Deeper Into Darkness
by NotesfromaClassroom
Summary: The back stories and missing pieces of Star Trek Into Darkness. After you've seen the film, come here for the bigger picture.
1. Unforeseen Consequences

**Chapter One: Unforeseen Consequences**

**Disclaimer: I do not own these characters nor make any profit from writing about them. These missing scenes are from my imagination only and are my original creations.**

Nyota Uhura slides into the chair at her communications console with practiced ease. Six months into the _Enterprise's_ shakedown cruise and she's so comfortably familiar with the controls that she sometimes dreams about them, their beeps and whirls and clicks like steady background noise.

Not that they are so familiar that they are boring. Not at all. No matter how many times she reports to the bridge, she still finds it beautiful. Yes, _beautiful_. Bright and orderly and entertaining and promising. Like Christmas morning. Like the first day of a new school year. Once she had tried to explain her feelings to Spock but he had raised an eyebrow at her before she had gotten very far.

The bridge this morning is quieter than usual with both the captain and Spock called down to headquarters for a meeting with Admiral Pike.

Or at least, the captain's absence makes it quieter. Since returning from Nibiru, Spock has been maddeningly reserved. The first night after he had materialized on the transporter pad, his exosuit smoking, the stench of sulphur and ozone filling the room, Spock had said almost nothing about what had happened, answering her concerned questions with monosyllables. More than once in the following two weeks he has rebuffed her invitation to her quarters, pleading work. She isn't fooled. He's avoiding her.

Or rather, avoiding talking about his apparent willingness to die. Nibiru is simply the latest in a series of headlong rushes toward annihilation, choices he has made without remorse, without even any consideration for what his loss would mean to the people who care about him, to her.

She understands that he's grieving the loss of Vulcan, the loss of his mother—understands better than he does. But understanding doesn't help her know what to do.

Nor had Dr. McCoy been able to offer much help when she confided in him.

"If _you_ can't get into his head," the doctor told her when she first approached him, "I don't know who can. I'll put out the word, but I doubt we're going to find a Vulcan healer anytime soon."

The lift doors open and Montgomery Scott walks out, a stack of flimplasts in his arms. Without a word Hikaru Sulu rises from the captain's chair and moves swiftly back to the helm.

"She's all yours," Sulu says, but Mr. Scott barely acknowledges him, looking instead at a readout on one of the flimplasts. Nyota makes a point of catching Sulu's eye as he swivels around in his chair. She's teased him before about his hesitation taking the captain's chair.

"I feel like an imposter," he's told her more than once, each time making her laugh.

"Any word from the captain?" Scott says to her as he sits down, and she shakes her head.

"They've only been gone an hour," she says. She knows what Scott is really asking. While nothing has been said officially, scuttlebutt has it that Starfleet is getting ready to single out a ship for a five year exploratory mission. After Nero, Starfleet has been on such high alert that science has taken a backseat to the military functions, but the push to resume what many see as its primary purpose has intensified recently. Kirk hasn't bothered to hide his optimism that the _Enterprise_ and this crew will be selected, that the reason he and Spock have been called to a meeting is so Admiral Pike can give them the news.

"What do you think?" Nyota had asked Spock last night when they met in the galley for a cup of tea. Spock cradled his cup in his hands and stared into his cooling tea before looking up.

"Unlikely that we will be chosen," he said. Nyota felt herself prickle defensively.

"Why not?"

"An untested crew, the ship still undergoing startup maintenance. An inexperienced captain making questionable command decisions—"

"—to save your life!"

"Nyota, we have spoken of this already. Doing so again is an unprofitable use of our time."

There it was again, Spock shutting her out and justifying it as logical.

If she weren't so angry she would have argued further. Instead, she finished her tea in silence before standing up and saying goodnight, a flicker of surprise crossing Spock's face. So, he had planned to join her in her quarters for the evening. _So much for that,_ she thought, hoping he felt as disappointed as she did.

"Let me know as soon as you hear something," Scott says, setting most of the flimplasts on the floor beside him and then giving his attention fully to the one in his hand.

Nyota glances back at her console and double checks the time. Spock and Captain Kirk have been gone 74 minutes. 74.43 minutes, to be exact. Despite herself, she grins at the way she's picked up Spock's habit of marking time so precisely.

A flashing light indicates an incoming signal and Nyota toggles the receiver on. The image of a stylized delta scrolls across the screen followed by the words _Reassignment Orders_.

For a moment Nyota's heart races with excitement. They are being reassigned to the exploratory mission!

But as the transmission continues her face flushes and her pulse throbs in her ears. She blinks as the meaning of the message sinks in.

Effective immediately, James T. Kirk is no longer captain of the _Enterprise_.

Nyota tries to swallow, to get her voice. At once she knows what has happened. Spock's report. She'd read it, of course, and the captain's log, too—part of her task in coding and transmitting them to HQ. Spock's report was unflinching in its criticism of the captain's decision to reveal the _Enterprise_ to the Nibiruans, even as he acknowledged that those actions saved his life.

"You know he'll be called to account," she had said, holding her transcription PADD in her hand, buttonholing Spock when the captain was off the bridge, her tone asking him to reconsider, but Spock had shut her down over that conversation, too. Afterwards she had hoped that the consequences—a planet saved, the natives unharmed—would weigh in the captain's favor despite the violation of the Prime Directive.

Apparently not.

"Mr. Scott," she says, finally able to speak. "You need to see this."

Before Scott can get up, the transmission signal beeps again and the Starfleet emblem flashes on the screen.

_Reassignment for Commander Sch'n T'Gai Spock._

Nyota knows he won't be pleased with the promotion, that captaining the _Enterprise_ has never been his goal, that such a responsibility will, in fact, interfere with what he enjoys most, organizing and directing the science department.

Well, too bad, she thinks. The price he'll have to pay for ignoring her at every turn, for plowing ahead as if his actions have no unforeseen consequences.

The transmission continues and Nyota keeps one finger on the autosave, sending the message to the ship's archive as well as to Spock's personal queue.

_Effective immediately, reassigned as First Officer, USS Bradbury, Frank Abbott Captain._

For a moment she can't breathe.

"What is it, lassie?" Scott says, stepping up behind her chair. "What'd you want me to see?"

But all she can do is point, both orders spelled out on the monitor.

X X X

"Are you giving me _attitude_, Spock?"

Of course he is. Spock didn't grow up with three human cousins for nothing. Although they lived in Seattle and he spent most of his time on Vulcan, Spock and his aunt Cecilia's children got together at regular intervals for family gatherings and holidays. Older by three years, his cousin Chris was the more stolid of the three young humans, serious the way firstborns often are but willing to break a rule or two in the service of his own curiosity about things. Chris's two sisters, Anna and Rachel, were a year older and younger than Spock, willing participants in the kind of mischief that sometimes made Spock question—only half in jest—their intelligence.

Rachel, in particular, was his tutor in all things _attitude._ She was the master of the derisive snort, the witty snark, the bombshell commentary delivered with an innocence that often saved her. After a summer break spent watching her and her siblings when he was 14, Spock returned home and immediately got into hot water with Amanda the first time he rolled his eyes at something she said.

"I beg your pardon!" she snapped, her brows knit together in genuine anger. "Don't you dare start acting like a human teenager!"

He's only slightly abashed to be showing _attitude_ to Admiral Pike now. The Admiral's questioning the entire Nibiru mission, not just Captain Kirk's violation of the Prime Directive, is…irritating. Spock feels it necessary to set Pike straight, pointing out that the mission objectives included saving an entire race from extinction and a planet from destruction. If not for the captain's decision to reveal the _Enterprise _to the natives—

"That's a technicality," Pike says, blowing off Spock's explanation.

"I am a Vulcan," Spock replies, channeling his cousins. "We embrace technicalities."

The Admiral's face flushes then—a sign Spock has come to recognize as the precursor of angry words in a human. He braces himself, and sure enough, the Admiral raises his voice and orders him out.

"You're dismissed," the Admiral says, and Spock stands for a moment, unwilling to disobey but torn about leaving Jim Kirk alone to defend himself.

The young captain pointedly looks away when Spock tries to meet his eye, and that, more than anything else, sends him out the door.

His first impulse is to return to the ship. There's nothing he can do here for Kirk—if anything _can_ be done for the captain. The odds are good that Kirk will be booted out of the service—the violation of the Prime Directive one of the most serious offenses. On the other hand, Kirk's inexperience and his rapid promotion undoubtedly contributed to what happened. That might figure in determining the official response, not counting the investment Starfleet has already made in Kirk's education and training. The Admiralty might be willing to overlook his transgression, perhaps this once or with a stern warning.

Though that seems unlikely. As Spock makes his way out of the building, he presses the fingers of his right hand against his left side and takes a breath to steady himself.

The normal morning fog over the bay is starting to burn off when Spock makes his way along the Academy grounds near the Presidio. Vaguely he has an idea that he will walk to the transport station near the East Gate and beam back up to the ship, but at the East Gate he doesn't stop, continuing on along the Marina toward a cluster of nondescript government buildings. Not until he finds himself at the front of the Vulcan Embassy does he realize that this was his destination all along.

If his father is surprised to see him standing in the doorway of his office, he gives no sign—his equanimity, as always, something Spock envies as much as admires.

"Spock," he says by way of invitation. As Spock crosses the room, Sarek stands up and steps from behind his desk.

"Forgive this intrusion," Spock says, glancing uneasily at the two other embassy staff who are watching from work stations nearby. Sarek inclines his head a fraction and Spock continues. "I wonder if I might have a word."

"Of course," Sarek says at once. "Come with me."

Feeling an upwelling of gratitude that his father does not treat his request as something intemperate, Spock follows him out of his office and to the breakroom down the corridor. Currently no one occupies it and Sarek walks to the counter where a teakettle sits ready.

Pouring two cups of dark liquid and handing one to Spock, Sarek moves to a small round table near a window and sits down. Spock sits down opposite him. For a moment neither man speaks.

"You are troubled by something," Sarek says at last. Spock feels a wave of embarrassment that his father can read him so clearly—though Sarek's deduction could be based on the fact that Spock rarely seeks him out.

For the next few minutes he tells his father everything—how his own assessment of the supervolcano on Nibiru helped determine the course of action, how he and the chief engineer had designed and built the cold fusion reactor that shut down the impending explosion, how planting it in the volcano had come at the price of exposure to the natives.

"The captain saved my life," Spock says, "but in doing so violated the Prime Directive. The odds are high that his career in Starfleet will be terminated because of this. Because of…me."

"You did not ask this of him," his father says, slowly sipping his tea. "You are not responsible for your captain's decision."

"I asked him _not_ to attempt a rescue," Spock says. "Yet I feel responsible nevertheless."

He waits for his father to point out how emotional his response is, and even worse, how illogical. But Sarek does neither. Instead, he watches his son with an unflinching gaze.

"I am not sure what to do," Spock says after another moment.

Setting his cup on the table, Sarek folds his hands on front of him.

"Thank him for me."

"What?"

When Sarek speaks again, his voice is almost rueful. "I am not sorry that Captain Kirk violated the Prime Directive in this instance. I cannot pretend that any principle of noninterference means more to me than your life."

"Lieutenant Uhura agrees with you," Spock murmurs. At that his father raises an eyebrow and nods.

"And you do not approve."

"Rules and regulations mean nothing if we break them for personal gain. Without them, there is no order."

It's a variation of the argument he and Nyota have had for the past two weeks. Unlike Nyota, however, his father seems willing to let him have the last word.

His teacup empty, Sarek stands up.

"If the captain loses his commission—" Spock begins.

"I will speak on his behalf if I can."

It will probably do nothing, but Spock feels less burdened.

"And now? You are returning to the ship?" Sarek asks as they head into the corridor and back toward his office.

"Soon," Spock says. "I have a gift I want to purchase at a pottery shop on Kober Street."

The pottery shop is one he and Nyota have visited several times. Two years ago he bought a pleasingly imperfect _asenoi_ there, the firepot nubbed and ridged by the potter's fingerprints. Later he had given Nyota a tea mug with the same rough brown glaze, not quite matching the _asenoi_ but close enough to imply a connection.

One morning shortly after he returned from Nibiru, the mug slipped from her hand and shattered.

Replacing it feels oddly symbolic—and necessary.

His father says nothing but nods again, as if he approves—which, Spock thinks, he might. Sarek had often surprised Amanda with small, unannounced gifts, usually something utilitarian but sometimes objects of no particular value other than as souvenirs of his travels—a tiny carving of a plant from a distant planet in the Sauri system, for example, or a crystal pendant that changed colors depending on the mood or the wearer. His mother always seemed overjoyed by the effort. The lesson was not lost on Spock.

He imagines unwrapping the mug with Nyota tonight after she gets off her shift, placing it in her hands and watching her face light up.

He's missed that—missed their intimacy—but even as he longs for it, he feels a weariness and distance that he can't quite control.

"Sarek!"

One of the embassy workers meets him at the door, his voice giving away his distress.

"What it is, Seral?"

"A bombing. In London. Starfleet Archives. The Federation President is on the line."

**A/N: We're off! My plan is not to rewrite the movie but to add to it, filling in backstory and fleshing out missing pieces to make what is already there a fuller experience. I hope you find this story adds to your pleasure as you rewatch the film! Let me know! (The "missing pieces" of the Nibiru mission are described in "Running in the Dark.")  
**

**If you want more Star Trek fun, check out my profile for a list of other stories involving the crew. Spock's cousins figure in a few, including "What We Think We Know," and Spock meets Captain Pike—and puts some Vulcan attitude on display—in "The Interview."**


	2. Change of Plans

**Chapter Two: Change of Plans**

**Disclaimer:** **I do not own these characters nor make any profit from writing about them. These missing scenes are from my imagination only and are my original creations.**

When Jim Kirk signals that he's beaming up to the _Enterprise_, Nyota says, "He's coming."

From his place in the command chair, Scotty nods.

"Aye, he'll be wanting to give us his side of the story," he says.

What Scotty doesn't say is that Kirk will also want to meet with his senior officers in private, will want to record a message for the rest of the crew, giving them an explanation as much as a goodbye.

Or at least he should, Nyota thinks. He owes them that much.

Blinking back the threatened tears, she feels her mouth filling with the taste of ashes. Forcing herself to focus on her console in front of her, she tries to ignore the heaviness in her stomach.

As she monitors the traffic and communications between Earth and the ship, she waits for Spock to return her messages, but since he beamed down this morning, she's heard nothing from him. His message queue hasn't been accessed either.

At one time she would have said that being incommunicado was unlike him. Lately she isn't sure.

Sitting at Spock's station is Lieutenant Hannity, a dark-haired woman a few years older than Nyota. Something about Hannity's movements—her hand going suddenly to the comm link in her ear, her other arm thrown out to her side—catches Nyota's attention.

"There's been an attack on a Starfleet facility!" Hannity says, her voice garbled with emotion. "In London! The news reports are coming in."

Sure enough, the channels dedicated to Starfleet communiqués are suddenly flooded. Frantically Nyota sorts the most pressing ones and sends the others to a priority list. Over her comm link she hears a cacophony of voices calling out damage assessments and casualty projections.

"On screen!" Scotty says, and Nyota pipes in a BBC newscast, a dazed anchorwoman standing near blackened, smoking heaps of twisted girders, ambulances blaring in the background, the police and rescue workers already sorting through the destruction. Across the bottom of the screen scroll updates about the numbers of workers found so far in the Kelvin Memorial Archives.

Mentally Nyota goes through the list of her friends working in London…Janice and K'reth at Starfleet's communication hub, Ariel at the transport center. She gives a sigh of relief that she knows no one at the Archives—and then is instantly ashamed of herself. People died. Whether or not she knows them is immaterial.

An audio message from Starfleet Headquarters comes in and Nyota cuts the feed to the BBC broadcast. It's a recording from Admiral Marcus putting everyone on high alert—but no specific orders yet.

_Why hasn't Spock checked in? _

Are personal comm signals getting through? The thought crosses Nyota's mind briefly as she struggles to keep up with the increased electronic traffic.

"If we have to leave in a hurry," Scotty says, waving Sulu to the captain's chair, "I want to make sure engineering's ready."

Nyota turns to remind him that Jim Kirk is somewhere aboard but Scotty is already gone.

The transporter request signal beeps, causing Nyota to jump. Finally! Surely when Spock gets back up he can sort out what must be a miscommunication in his orders and start organizing the _Enterprise's_ ready response. Why would Starfleet transfer him to another ship, especially after Jim Kirk had already been removed from the _Enterprise_? It makes no sense.

On one hand, Nyota has always known that she and Spock were fortunate to be assigned the same duty posts.

On the other hand—well, she isn't ready to consider the other hand just yet.

Glancing at the transporter tagline, she's startled that it is a notice about an impending beam down instead of a beam up. She had assumed Spock was signaling from the transport station at HQ. Flicking open the screen, she sees that the request is from Jim Kirk.

_He's leaving the ship without a word to the bridge crew?_

"Break!" she says, standing up so swiftly that Lt. Hannity looks up in alarm. "I'll be back in 15 minutes."

Even as she presses the button to deck seven and lurches slightly as the turbolift takes off, even as she runs down the corridor to the transporter room, Nyota isn't sure what she will say to the captain.

That she's sorry, certainly. That Spock's reason for writing the report was duty and nothing more—not out of any desire to embarrass or harm Kirk. Not to cost him his command.

_Words that should be coming from Spock and not her, of course. Communications officer, indeed._

She gets to the transporter room as Kirk is stepping onto the pad. Already dressed in dark civilian clothes, he carries a duffel in one hand, a suit bag in the other.

"Captain, wait!" she calls, and he looks up.

"Not the captain," he says, and for a moment she thinks she's too late, that he's going to nod to the transporter officer and leave in a swirl of light and motion.

Then he sets his duffel down and steps off the pad. In the dim light of the transporter room his expression is hard to read, his eyes set at half-mast, the set of his jaw almost angry.

_Well, that's to be expected._ Nyota takes a breath and swallows.

"You aren't going to address the crew?"

She tries not to sound accusatory but her voice breaks. He narrows his eyes at her.

"Not my crew, or didn't you see the orders? I'm headed back to school, apparently."

Nyota feels her face flush—partly in shock and partly out of shame for Kirk. Getting demoted would have been one thing, but being sent back to the Academy is the equivalent of being booted out of the service altogether.

"I'm—I'm sorry. I didn't—"

Kirk shrugs his shoulders.

"Look," he says, "I don't really want to talk about it. I've got lots of things to do."

She knows that's a lie, that he's dressed in a leather jacket and casual pants because he's on his way to a bar—or to the comfort of someone in a bar.

A wave of desperation and despair washes over her.

"You heard about the bombing?"

She isn't sure why she says this. To remind him that he's still part of Starfleet, no matter what he thinks right now? A hope that he will set aside his personal disappointment and rise to the aid of those who might need him?

"I heard," he says, turning and stepping back up onto the transporter pad. His face is an odd mixture of regret and rage, like someone both wanting and _not_ wanting to react. When he speaks, his voice is not as harsh as his words would suggest. "Not my fight."

Picking his duffel back up, he purses his lips and nods to the transporter officer.

"I'm sorry," Nyota says again, but this time she means something else—that she's sorry to see him broken, sorry that he's giving up so quickly.

"Don't worry about me," he says as the telltale swirl begins. "I don't have to work with Spock anymore. You _do._"

She lifts her hand to call him back, to ask about Spock's reassignment. Is Kirk saying that Spock will be on the _Enterprise_ after all? But the transporter hum fades and Jim Kirk is gone.

"You okay?" Hannity asks when she returns to the bridge, and Nyota nods, appreciating her concern.

She _will_ be okay, one way or the other.

For the next few hours she holds herself to that mantra. _No matter what happens, I will be okay. _The horrifying news from London—the pictures in graphic detail, the list of casualties—keep her from any drift toward self-pity.

And then another order comes across her screen—Admiral Pike reassigned captain of _USS Enterprise_, effective immediately.

She barely has time to register what that means when the baffling news that Jim Kirk will be his first officer crosses the boards.

Was the threat of sending him back to the Academy just that, a threat? Or some sort of _Kobayashi Maru_ test of character?

That means it's true, then. Spock will be transferred to the _Bradbury_. She feels her heart fall.

"Coded message coming through," Hannity says, and Nyota switches on the decryption program. An emergency meeting at the Daystrom Center at Starfleet Headquarters. All available ship captains and first officers to attend.

She patches the message to Sulu, still in the captain's chair, and Scotty, still in engineering, but there's nothing they need to do. Presumably Admiral Pike and Kirk have been notified and are on their way.

And Spock. Surely by now he's heard about his transfer—though Nyota sees that he has not tapped into his message queue all day. She has no doubt that he knows—that part of his silence is his unwillingness to talk to her about it.

He'll be at Daystrom, too, with his new captain.

_No matter what happens, I will be okay_, she thinks, but the words ring hollow.

Thirty-seven minutes until the end of her shift, and then she can escape to her quarters and think about everything that has happened today—the whiplash of so many events unfolding at once. Spock's _asenoi_ comes to mind and she has an image of herself sitting cross-legged in front of it, the way Spock has shown her, using the flame to block out all the mental noise that is keeping her unsettled. If he isn't back soon she may try to meditate for awhile.

"Another coded message," Hannity says, and Nyota turns on the recorder with a weariness that surprises her. Giving herself a mental shake, she starts to read the message as it comes in.

_Attack on Daystrom Center, Starfleet Headquarters, San Francisco. Extreme casualties. Assailant unknown._

X X X

Before he opens the door to his quarters, he knows she's here. Spock doesn't know how he knows—and he's never spoken to Nyota about it—but her physical presence is like a trip wire in his brain, alerting him when she's nearby.

Not the kind of formal bond between Vulcan couples, steady and unspoken, but _something_ connects them.

Hesitating for a moment and slipping out of his gray jacket, he enters the room. The automatic sensor recognizes his biosignature and turns on the heat. Palming the control on the wall beside the door, he turns the heat back off—a compromise he often makes for Nyota's comfort.

The only light in the room comes from the candle guttering into a puddle inside his _asenoi_, the fire pot sitting securely in its tripod, but Spock can make out Nyota clearly. Lying curled up and on her side on top of the duvet on the bed, she's still in her uniform, her boots on the floor where she must have dropped them. Her hair is splayed across the pillow, her breathing slow and regular.

Stepping as softly as he can, Spock makes his way to the side of the bed and stands there, watching her sleep, tempted to wake her.

Flexing the fingers of his right hand, he feels the tug of skin glue where a medic hastily repaired the deepest of the cuts, probably gotten when he lifted Captain Bradbury from the glass-strewn floor.

He lifts his left hand and turns it palm up, remembering how chilly Admiral Pike's cheek had felt when he brushed his fingertips there.

The memory makes his heart race and he lowers his hand and steadies his breathing until he can think again without pain.

The evening had begun badly—Jim Kirk's anger evident from the moment they spoke as they entered Daystrom Center. Then came the surprising revelation that the captain had been demoted—and the equally surprising discovery that he himself had been transferred to another ship. Unwelcome news, though Spock had been quick to point out that the repercussions could have been dire. Were, in fact, surprisingly positive for Kirk, whose career had been in serious jeopardy after the Nibiru mission.

The meeting of captains and first officers in the conference room was short lived—just enough time for Admiral Marcus to apprise them of the facts about the rogue agent before Jim Kirk began to question things—Admiral Pike's face visibly falling as Kirk spoke up, unfazed, about the inconsistencies in the data, about the fact that so many Starfleet officers were here now, assembled in this room.

Spock had looked up then and caught Kirk's eye.

What was that human phrase? _Sitting ducks?_

"It _is_ curious that Harrison would commandeer a jumpship with no warp capability if his intention was to escape—" Spock began, but the whir of rotors and the lights of a ship outside the window cut him off.

"Clear the room!" Kirk shouted, but it was too late.

Unarmed, Spock could do little more than pull the wounded out of the way of fire. He had no idea where Kirk went—at least not until later, when they sat with the other survivors for a debriefing and he heard his account.

All at once Spock is very cold, shivering.

With a little gasp, Nyota opens her eyes. Lifting her arm, she beckons him to her side and he complies, lying down facing away from her, feeling her arm drape over his waist, her chin tucked against his shoulder blade.

"I've been so afraid," she murmurs, and though he knows she expects some sort of response, he cannot think what he should say.

That he was afraid, too? That being under fire in the conference room was in many ways more frightening than standing in the bottom of the supervolcano—less predictable, the violence both random and purposeful?

That even while he was steadily calculating the odds of his own survival, shifting his tactics in dodging the jumpship's fire while making his way to his fallen comrades, another part of his brain was marveling at how his sense of time was skewed, how even as he was ticking off the seconds with his customary precision—knowing, for instance, that the time elapsed from the first shot until the jumpship crashed in the courtyard below was a mere 4.38 minutes—his subjective experience was quite different. Indeed, if someone had asked him, he would have said that the attack seemed interminable, lasting the better part of an hour.

He could tell her what he saw in Admiral Pike's mind—people he cared about, who cared about him—or the sorrow and anger he felt as he realized he was dying. Or worse, the confusion as his mind shut down. And worst of all, his overwhelming loneliness, Spock unable to offer him any real companionship or comfort at the end.

But the thought of telling her any of this makes him shiver again and she tightens her grasp.

"Talk to me," she whispers.

He shifts slightly to ease the ache in his hip and something hard-edged presses into his side. Sliding one hand underneath him, he fishes out a book that she was reading when she fell asleep.

It's a real book—an actual set of paper pages bound in a nubbed lavendar cover— erotic Vulcan poetry from pre-Surakian days, a gift from him more than a year ago.

_I ravish you in my dreams,_ her favorite poem begins.

"I need to find Mr. Scott," he says abruptly, sitting up and placing the book on the bedside table. "He may be able to assist in the investigation of the wreckage."

As he stands up he senses her disappointment and sadness with him. Through whatever it is that they share—this thing that binds them—he knows he's hurting her.

"We will talk later," he says, but even as he does he knows she doesn't believe him, that she's right not to.

**A/N: Thanks to everyone for the encouraging words! If you've found this story and are enjoying it—or even if you aren't—I appreciate hearing from you.**

**Although I've seen the movie twice now, the pace is so fast that I'm sure I'll muddle some of the details. Thanks for bearing with me!**

**The book of erotic Vulcan poetry figures in several other stories, too. Check my profile if you want to read stories about how Spock and Nyota came to be a couple.**


	3. Lost and Found

**Chapter Three: Lost and Found**

**Disclaimer: These "missing scenes" are from my imagination only. I make no money here (and not that much from my "real" job!)**

As soon as he hears the door buzzer, Scotty opens his eyes.

"I'm asleep!" he shouts across his darkened quarters.

The buzzer sounds again.

With a sigh, Scotty rolls out of bed and stumbles across the room.

"I'm asleep," he says as he palms open the door.

_Had _been asleep. Now visibly alarmed by the appearance of Commander Spock standing in his doorway, Scotty straightens, feathers the fingers of one hand through his tousled hair, and blinks with a deliberateness that suggests he is forcing himself to be alert.

"You needed to see me, sir?"

Spock's expression is unreadable—even more so than usual—though Scotty has the impression that the first officer is wound as tight as a wire—also more than usual. Well, no wonder, that. Scotty's been monitoring the reports all evening coming out of Headquarters, only handing off the captain's chair to Sulu when he realized he could hardly hold his eyes open.

That was, what, two hours ago? He had fallen into bed exhausted, asleep at once.

Stifling a yawn, he blinks again, waiting for Spock to tell him what he needs from him.

"As you know, Captain Kirk was assigned the position of first officer and Admiral Pike was to assume command of the _Enterprise._"

Spock's voice doesn't waver but he stops for a moment and looks away. Then something internal seems to shift and he continues.

"Captain Kirk is still at headquarters assisting in the investigation. Captain Abbott was seriously wounded in the attack, putting my transfer to the _Bradbury_ in question. At the moment, I am…between assignments. I believe I can use this time wisely, with your help."

A judder of electricity shakes Scotty awake from his head to his toes. When Spock asks for help, something major is about to happen.

"Of course, sir. Say the word."

"Come with me."

Without looking back, Spock pivots and starts down the corridor toward the lift. Darting back into the room, Scotty snatches up his red overshirt from the chair where he had tossed it and slips it on as he hurries after Spock.

Only when they exit the turbolift and head left to the transporter room instead of right to engineering is Scotty certain that they are going planetside. _Good._ Watching the news vids and listening to Starfleet chatter for hours has made him restless to see things firsthand.

The transporter officer wordlessly hands Spock a tricorder and holds up a portable scanner to Scotty, confirming what Scotty had suspected: Spock knew he would agree to come.

The confusion surrounding the site of the attack is evident as soon as they materialize on the transporter pad outside the auxiliary building next to Daystrom Conference Center. The earlier rescue crews have been replaced by security officers sifting through the wreckage for evidence. Looking up, Scotty can make out the gaping hole where the conference room had been.

Teams of investigators have already separated the remains of the attack jumpship from the rest of the building debris. Fortunately no one questions Scotty's and Spock's presence as they make their way around the cordoned off section.

The engine from the jumpship is the largest intact portion, but Scotty's scanner shows nothing unusual about it.

"Short-range flitter capabilities," he says, more to himself than for Spock's benefit. "Engine seized up when this—" he points to a chunk of pressform concrete slab and attached wiring—"came through the air intake."

"The captain's handiwork," Spock says. Scotty waits for him to elaborate but he's focused on his tricorder, hovering over a crumpled piece of metal protruding from what looks like a secondary energy source.

"What do you make of this?" Spock says, and Scotty redirects his scanner.

"Dunno," he says. "Looks like a power fluctuator, but I've never seen one like this on a ship this small. You wouldn't need it. The primary activator gives you all the power you need."

"Unless," Spock says, "you are using your ship to do things other than fly."

"I don't take your meaning, sir."

"Transportation, Mr. Scott, comes in many forms."

"Aye," Scotty says, "but what kind of transport—"

And then with the kind of sudden insight that makes his work as an engineer his chosen calling, Scotty knows.

"He had a transporter aboard."

"It would seem so," Spock says. "That would explain why no human remains have been found in the wreckage."

Getting close to the cockpit is more difficult than looking over the engine. Investigators are busy testing for biological artifacts—fingerprints, virus droplets, anything to positively ID the attacker, though at this point, such work is a formality. Even the civilian media is reporting John Harrison as the suspected perpetrator of both the London bombing and the attack on Starfleet Headquarters.

A demolition team is systematically pulling apart the cockpit and cataloging each section, laying them out on a long worktable like a twisted jigsaw puzzle. Spock walks along one side while Scotty walks down the other, dividing his attention from the scanner to the pieces of duranium and plastic and glass.

If the consequences weren't so dire—if the cause weren't so awful—Scotty would be enjoying himself. More than any other crew member on the _Enterprise_, Scotty understands how Spock can lose himself in the pleasure of a knotty conundrum. More than once he's overheard someone compare him to the Vulcan when he doggedly sniffed out some gremlin in the machinery.

"Let it go," Keenser told him recently when he couldn't locate the source of a recurring power surge. To be fair, the surge caused no damage and did little more than flicker a single monitor from time to time, but knowing there was something amiss with one of the power couplings drove him to find it, as much for the satisfaction of knowing the answer as anything else.

Stubbornness, some called it. Tenacity, Scotty replied.

As Scotty moves the scanner over bits of broken machinery on the table, he thinks of the last time he and Spock worked this closely on a project. Was it only three weeks ago when the _Enterprise_ had first parked in orbit over Nibiru? Their assignment was simple—a routine scan, that's all. Eavesdrop on the pre-industrial natives, take some seismic readings—ordinary stuff. Boring even.

Until the seismic readings went off the chart and a geosurvey of that blasted supervolcano glaring into the atmosphere like an angry eye meant the captain called a meeting of his officers to discuss their options.

"The volcano sits on a confluence of fault lines at the northern edge of the largest continent," Spock said, directing his attention to the monitor on top of the table in the conference room. "According to our calculations, the geothermal pressures will cause a massive eruption in 42.12 hours."

"_Approximately _42.12 hours," Dr. McCoy said as if he were finding fault with Spock's precision, but Scotty knew the doctor better than that. His real irritation was with the situation, with how hopeless it seemed.

"If we can lure the inhabitants out of the area—" Sulu began, but Spock shook his head. "The eruption will destroy most of the surrounding landmass. In addition, the particulate matter ejected into the atmosphere will obscure the sunlight for some time, effectively killing all vegetative life on the planet. Even if the sentient natives survive the initial blast, they _will_ die."

"There has to be something we can do," Captain Kirk said, but again Spock shook his head. Ignoring him, the captain went on. "You said it yourself, Spock. This planet and its people are doomed. There must a habitable planet in this sector we can transfer them to. The population is less than—"

"The Prime Directive disallows such an option. These people live in loose tribal collectives, have no technology more advanced than simple weapons, and speak a language we have not yet deciphered. Even if we _could _communicate with them, even if we could find a suitable planet for resettlement, their culture would be irreparably altered by our interference."

Sitting next to Scotty, McCoy let out a loud harrumph.

"So we let them die," he huffed. "That's an irreparable alteration, if you ask me."

"You know the proscriptions of the Prime Directive as well as I do," Spock said. "Our options are limited by it."

McCoy started to open his mouth, presumably to argue, but the captain said, "Then let's figure out a work around. Can we somehow minimize the results of the eruption? Or stop it altogether?"

"Our mission is to observe only. Any interference would still violate the Prime Directive," Spock said.

"Not if they don't _know_ we interfered," the captain snapped back. Not true, of course, though no one in the room contradicted him.

Except Spock.

"Their knowledge of our interference is beside the point. Additionally, the odds are high that they would know we interfered. If the inhabitants see us, I calculate the possibility of culture shock for people unaware of space travel to be—"

"Please don't," McCoy said.

"But Mr. Spock's right," Sulu chimed in. "They'd see us if we tried to do anything to the volcano. Assuming we even _could_ do anything to it."

Suddenly Scotty was aware that everyone was looking at him.

"Aye," he said slowly. "If you detonated a warp core inside it, you might stop the natural eruption, but you'd blow the planet up in the process."

Captain Kirk pressed both palms flat on the table in front of him.

"What about something less catastrophic than a warp core breach? Something that just seals the volcano up?"

"Cap it, you mean?" McCoy said skeptically. "Is that even possible?"

Again Scotty felt everyone's eyes on him.

"Dunno," he said, looking at Spock. "If we cannae seal it, we might be able to neutralize it somehow."

"Spock?"

"It seems unlikely," he said, turning to the captain. "Revealing our presence to the inhabitants seems inevitable regardless of any action we take concerning the volcano."

"So we just give up! Just let an entire planet die!"

"I did not say that, Doctor," Spock said, a beat slower and softer than before. As Scotty watched, the doctor's face flushed, his inadvertent reminder of the loss of Vulcan echoing in the room.

With a visible effort, Spock went on. "I can go over the geologic data with Mr. Scott, Captain, though I estimate the odds of finding a feasible solution—"

His eyes slid in McCoy's direction.

"—as negligible," he finished.

The captain gave a short nod.

"See what you can do," he said.

The other senior officers left then but Scotty stayed behind to look more closely at the survey data. What made the volcano such a danger was where it was positioned. The substrata that supported it was unstable, straddling several fault lines that lay like a cooling crust on top of a huge reservoir of magma. The tectonic shifts were subsuming one of the continental plates under the others, opening a rift in the molten lake below.

Spock was right. The eruption was inevitable. And soon.

As he read through the report, Scotty could feel Spock watching him. _Waiting for him to confirm what Spock had already decided, that any attempt would be useless? And a violation of the Prime Directive to boot?_

Probably.

But when Scotty looked up, he caught a fleeting glimpse of something flickering in Spock's expression. Distress, maybe, or worry.

Whatever it was, it was replaced almost immediately with something Scotty recognized.

_Tenacity._

"If we could somehow glue those fault lines together, we could stabilize the tectonic shift—" Scotty mused out loud.

"Glue them?"

"I know it sounds crazy, Commander, but if we could find a way—"

"The magma reservoir. If we solidified it, it would hold the fault lines steady. _Glue _them, so to speak."

Soon the two of them spread PADDs across the conference table and Spock was ordering another shuttle-run over the planet's dark side to double check the seismic activity. In theory, cooling the magma pool would stop the eruption, but finding the means to do so still presented what seemed an insurmountable problem.

For hours they ran simulations. Simple detonations of thermonuclear charges either didn't set up the necessary chain reaction or were so powerful that they ignited the magma pool instead, destroying the planet in one cataclysmic explosion.

Twice someone—Lt. Uhura, perhaps?—brought food trays and beverage pitchers, leaving them silently on the side table while Spock and Scotty ran and reran the numbers, looking for a solution.

Once the captain poked his head in but he had the good sense to look over their shoulders and leave again.

They kept the orbital image of the red planet of Nibiru in the corner of one monitor like a silent rebuke. Waking up from a hastily cadged nap on the floor of his office, Scotty saw Spock staring at it, dark smudges under his eyes, and he knew—as well as anyone could know—that the planet stood in for Vulcan, explaining Spock's willingness to skirt the boundaries of the Prime Directive.

The solution had to be here somewhere, Scotty thought, rejoining Spock at the worktable. If they could find the right balance between outward force and inner resistance—

"A giant ice cube would do the trick," Scotty said, rubbing his bleary eyes. "But I don't think that's going to happen."

From the corner of his eye he saw Spock react, an almost imperceptible shift in his posture.

"Mr. Scott," he said, tapping in numbers on his PADD, "you may have solved our problem."

And that was how they came up with the idea of a cold fusion start using an ion emitter unit. Setting off that sort of reaction in the volcano's core would actually change the physical property of the semi-liquid magma to solid rock, stopping it, as it were, in its tracks, and sealing all of the fault lines together.

Now that they had the idea, Spock and Scotty left the conference room for engineering. The crew were deployed into work groups, some building the detonator, others working on the propulsion mechanism, Scotty and Spock moving between them making adjustments.

"There's still the wee problem of delivery," Scotty said as he machined the hinged box that would contain the reactor. "We cannae beam this in because of the electromagnetic interference. And we cannae just drop it in. Who knows where it would end up."

"Nor can we risk exposing the _Enterprise_ to the native inhabitants," Spock said. Although he was willing to bend the Prime Directive in one way, he was adamant that the inhabitants remain unaware.

"It's not just that," Scotty said, trying not to let his weariness show. "This ash in the atmosphere is already starting to gum up all our intake valves. I hate to think what will happen if we try to maintain a low orbit over that beastie for any amount of time."

The captain, not surprisingly, was the one who came up with the idea to put the _Enterprise_ in the Niburuan ocean, doing double duty hiding from the planet's inhabitants and protecting the ship from atmospheric contamination. Even as Scotty blustered that it was crazy, that it had never been tried, he could see from the cant of the captain's head, the set of his jaw, that his mind was made up.

"My poor bairns," Scotty moaned later as he tracked Sulu's navigation feed, watching the atmospheric and gravity sensors as the ship disappeared beneath the surface of the sea.

He protested even louder when the captain—and then Mr. Spock, insisting that his Vulcan physiology was hardier than a human's—made plans to modify an exosuit and take a drop line from a shuttle into the bottom of the volcano.

"If you aren't incinerated, man," Scotty blustered when Spock asked him to modify the temperature controls in the suit, "the shuttle won't be able to take the heat. There's no guarantee you'll make it out alive."

"As you indicated," Spock said, silencing Scotty with a look as much as with his words, "we cannot beam the device in, nor can we drop it. Someone must deliver and detonate it in person. That person is me."

Spock's words crashed on Scotty's ears with a finality that brooked no discussion. With a reluctant nod of his head, he started listing the equipment he would need to double the cooling coils inside the exosuit.

Naturally everything fell apart.

Not one to be squeamish about breaking rules when necessary, Scotty nevertheless understood Spock's tenacity later when he refused rescue. For one heartstopping moment on the bridge Scotty knew Spock was going to die—and knew that for all Spock's insistence that the Prime Directive was the reason behind his sacrifice, other darker forces drove him, too, with a depth of grief and guilt that no one on the bridge could quite understand, not even the lieutenant standing there, her hand to her mouth in horror.

And then the captain refused to let it happen.

In the end the extra cooling coils had helped spare the Commander's life. Certainly the drop line and the shuttle had failed as Scotty had predicted.

And the _Enterprise_ had shown itself to the inhabitants, as Spock had warned.

The Prime Directive broken. The planet saved.

And now this. Kirk's command uncertain, Spock transferred.

Scotty sets those thoughts aside and focuses on the puzzle at hand.

A sharp-edged rectangle of black and silver metal catches his attention. Waving the scanner over it, he frowns.

"Something of interest, Mr. Scott?"

"I'm not sure, sir. It looks like the controls for a transporter, but not a conventional one."

As Spock looks on, Scotty sets down the scanner and picks up the rectangular object. A control panel for sure, the telltale circuitry and toggles not a surprise. What is a surprise is the extra relay wired into what would have been the power source. Despite the warm morning, Scotty shivers.

"Bloody hell!"

"Mr. Scott?"

"Sorry, sir, but this was supposed to be secure! It's my bloody equation!"

"Equation?"

"Look. This control panel isn't just for any transporter. It's for a _transwarp _transporter. You know why that technology is heavily classified? Because if it is ever refined, ever expanded, no one is safe. A hostile force could simply beam into the middle of your party with no advance warning. Starships would become obsolete. Space travel as we know it would be over."

Spock shifts slightly and says, "Transwarp beaming remains a theory only, Mr. Scott. The stresses on molecular cohesion, the difficulty controlling the directional locator, the power induction—"

"It's possible, sir! I know! I've, uh, done it before."

Spock's already intense gaze becomes more so.

"The captain and I both did. When we transported aboard the _Enterprise_ from Delta Vega."

"As I recall," Spock says wryly, "you almost died doing so."

Scotty runs his finger along the inside of his collar.

"Almost," he says. "That problem with the directional locator you mentioned."

He points down at the control panel.

"This is definitely a transwarp transporter control. Someone in Starfleet is using my equation. Well," Scotty says, darting a glance at Spock, "_your_ equation. Aye, _yours._ You catch my drift."

The look of dawning comprehension spreads over Spock's face.

"Then contacting the captain is imperative," he says. "Whoever used this could be anywhere."

**A/N: So…if Spock Prime hadn't given Scotty the transwarp equation, would Scotty have discovered it on his own? Time travel conundrum.**

**Still reading? Thanks for letting me know!**


	4. Dark Nights of the Soul

**Chapter Four: Dark Nights of the Soul**

**Disclaimer: No money made here. **

At some point someone tells Jim Kirk to go home, that he's in the way. The dead and wounded have been moved. The clean-up crews are busy shoring up damaged building supports. The evidence team is piecing together the attack ship, sifting for clues. There's nothing for him to do here.

Like most Starfleet officers, he maintains a small apartment in San Francisco, a one-bedroom walk up with little to recommend it except for a view of the bay from Russian Hill. Briefly he considers going there now, but the idea of being alone is more than he can bear.

Vaguely he considers beaming up to the _Enterprise. _Earlier in the evening Spock had suggested it, but Jim shook his head silently, aware that the Vulcan watched him closely for a few moments before disappearing in the crowd.

The second time a uniformed officer approaches him, Jim makes his way out of the building and across the park to Starfleet's largest medical complex. From the glassed in waiting area of the 27th floor, he watches the recovery vehicles buzzing around the gaping hole in Daystrom as the sun slowly rises. From time to time, he hears a surgeon updating family members on the progress of the wounded.

No one asks him why he is here. Only later, after Spock calls him with news that Scotty has found something important in the wreckage, does Jim even realize that he's keeping vigil, that somewhere in this building Christopher Pike lies dead in the morgue.

At some level Jim knows he's in shock, that his responsibility to the ship precludes his need to grieve this way, but he doesn't care. 24 hours ago he was waltzing into Pike's office, confident the _Enterprise _was being given a plum assignment. A few minutes later he stumbled out angry, shocked by Spock's betrayal, stunned about losing the ship.

He isn't sorry for the way the Nibiru mission played out. But he is sorry he disappointed Christopher Pike, sorry he put him in a position to have to plead to have him assigned as his first officer.

"I believe in you," were some of Pike's last words to him, conferring on Jim such a measure of absolution that all night he replays the words in his head, his throat as tight as a tourniquet.

It's a contrast to Jim's last words to Spock before the emergency session.

"Where I come from when someone saves your life, you don't stab them in the back."

That wasn't true, of course. Where he came from, your back was never safe.

Not that his mother hadn't tried. Her marriage to Frank, for instance. Before Frank, Winona had been forced to move in with her parents, her Starfleet career taking her off-planet for months at a time. Jim's memories of his grandparents are vague—his grandmother already suffering from the progressive, incurable dementia that would kill her—his grandfather lost in a bewildering haze of caring for an ailing wife and his two young grandsons.

Jim and his older brother Sam rarely talk about those days. Cold cereal for most meals—they remember that. The smell of perspiration in their poorly washed clothes. Their mother appearing periodically like Christmas, then disappearing as quickly.

Loneliness and a drifty sense of purposeless days after Sam started school. A hazy memory of his grandmother's funeral, his mother holding his hand, slicking back his cowlick. His worry that when she left again she would have no reason to come back.

And then Frank came into their lives and the memories were plentiful and vivid.

The way Frank was at first a godsend, their mother laughing easily in his presence, her face lighting up when he told a joke or picked up her sons and swung them around until they were dizzy, letting them go and guffawing at the drunken way they wobbled and collapsed.

A metaphor, in some ways, for the marriage—though none of them knew it at the time.

Things started to fall apart after Winona's new posting on a border scout ship and Frank moved the family to an old farmhouse surrounded by cornfields and cow pastures. Isolated and bored, the boys were restless—and Frank soon soured on the reality of single parenting.

The abuse started then—not actual physical blows but words as hurtful, as damaging. Reckless. Stupid. Dummy.

Jim had no actual memories of his father, of course, and Sam had only a few. Under different circumstances their shared loss and mutual suffering would have made them allies, would have driven them together in the kind of protective siblinghood Jim observed in some of his friends and longed for with Sam. Rather than being in league with each other, they were competitive for Winona's infrequent attention, nursing their grievances against Frank in private.

When Jim drove his father's antique Chevy into the quarry he might as well have stood up and announced right then that his actions were the symbolic gestures of a desperate 12 year old. A year later when he was sent to the juvenile detention center in Sioux City, he felt angry and abashed and defiant and also relieved. As fraught as life was in juvie, it was a relief not to hear the daily shouting and grinding drama of life at home.

That first time he stayed for eight months—almost long enough to catch up on two years of schoolwork. He was sent back the second time for burning down a neighbor's barn—a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, hanging out with a small group of older boys who indulged their taste for arson by setting wildfires and lighting hay bales, sometimes igniting things too big to easily stomp out. Jim wasn't one of them—not really—just a lost boy along for the ride, but the authorities sent him away for another year and a half, and when he got home after that, Sam was gone and his mother had finally divorced Frank.

Several more years passed before Chris Pike found him in a bar at Riverside, a swaggering young man full of so much sound and fury that he'd already been thrown out of the only other bar in town—the one that catered to the locals, the one Starfleet personnel were warned away from.

He'd taken up Pike's challenge and shown up for the recruitment shuttle out of that same sense of reckless desperation that had pressed his foot to the gas pedal of his father's Chevy, as much for the rush as from any real hope of success. To his surprise—and to Pike's as well—he'd adapted to the regimented life at the Academy, perhaps even easier than his well-fed and well-heeled companions, the schedule of rising at dawn and studying past midnight a proverbial piece of cake after reform school.

At the end of the first quarter he had already distinguished himself in his leadership class. His athletic trainer stepped up his routines. His academic advisor sent a note to Pike which he later shared with Jim, a single sentence that he's never forgotten: _Your young recruit is exceeding all expectations._

Every few weeks that first year Pike would stop by for a short visit, usually just for a few words, but once taking Jim on a flitter hop to Riverside to see the progress of the _Enterprise_, the flagship whose building Pike was overseeing. Although he had grown up with the shipyards in view—had seen them so often that he no longer made note of their ghostly silhouette on the horizon—Jim was still impressed when Pike shepherded him past the security gate and led him aboard the ship itself.

It was love at first sight.

If he saw Pike less the next two years, it was partly his own fault. As the _Enterprise's_ launch date drew closer, the captain was in Iowa more often than he was in San Francisco. And more often than not when he dropped by the Academy unannounced, looking to take Jim for a drink or a talk, Jim was busy earning the reputation that would later make Cadet Uhura warn her roommate against dating him.

Coming back to his dorm room for a change of clothes, Jim might find Pike's neat handwriting on a card slipped under his door, a quaint relic of another time when people used paper to communicate.

_Catch you later._

The note would make Jim smile and grimace in short order, sorry to have missed his mentor, grateful that he was being looked for.

Losing that—Jim knows that he will never fully plumb the depths of that loss, that standing vigil in the medical center waiting room is the first step of a very, very long journey.

When Scotty reveals Harrison's destination on the Klingon homeworld—when Jim bullies his way back into the captain's chair and pulls Spock along with him—when he lets Scotty resign rather than lose any more time in the chase—when he finally has a moment to hear what Spock has been telling him about the immorality of what they are doing and declares to the crew that their mission is to capture and return the fugitive, knowing that contravening his orders this time will certainly cost him his ship—even then he is driven by an almost unthinking rage about being forced to travel this road.

And then the firefight on Qo'noS, the obsessive need to strike Harrison again and again—just another way station of grief, and a damned ineffective one at that.

"Cuff him," he says when he can catch his breath, and he walks away to look for his fallen security officers, leaving Spock to cover Harrison with a phaser rifle while Uhura puts the manacles on.

Lt. McCabe is on a raised platform, folded into an unmoving heap like a doll, his leg bent in an unnatural angle, a dead Klingon warrior at his feet.

Hendorff is further away, flat on his back, his jacket soaked with blood, blaster residue on his hands and face.

Jim stands over him, looking down at the unseeing eyes.

Of all the security officers on the _Enterprise_, Jim knows Hendorff best. Long ago they had come to a truce over a drink in Moe's, the bar nearest the Academy. Before leaving on the _Enterprise's_ shakedown cruise, Jim took him for a drink, lifted his palm upright, and solemnly swore never to call him Cupcake in public. He watched as a slow grin slid over Hendorff's face.

"And I promise never to beat you to within an inch of your life again," Hendorff said, raising his shot glass in salute.

"It wasn't that bad!"

Now that memory is overlaid with Admiral Pike's impressions. "An epic beating," he had called it yesterday afternoon when he found Jim hunkered down with a glass of whiskey in his hand. "You had napkins hanging out your nose."

And what had Jim bragged about earlier? That he'd never lost any crew on his watch?

Now he has.

With a start, he realizes that it is his duty to notify their families. Realizes with another start that he doesn't actually know anything personal about either McCabe or Hendorff—where they were from, what they did or thought about, whether they had family or people who loved them, who will meet their bodies at the transport hub and begin learning to live without them.

The trip in the K'Normian ship back to the _Enterprise_ is somber, Harrison secured in the cargo hold. At the last minute Jim refuses to stow the bodies of McCabe and Hendorff with him, laying them almost tenderly in the main cabin near the flight controls instead.

The security forces that greet them back on the ship are even more grimfaced than usual as they take care of their fallen own. Still, they resist any temptation to treat Harrison with unnecessary roughness, handling him with such caution and professionalism that Jim is ashamed of his own behavior on the planet's surface, behavior that left him unsatisfied and with nothing more than scraped knuckles to show for it.

As the redshirts surround Harrison and start moving toward the brig, Jim follows, Spock and Uhura right behind.

"I need to tell you something," he hears Uhura say, and for a moment he thinks she is speaking to him. He half turns to answer her and catches a glimpse of her profile, her eyes on Spock.

Spock says nothing but some signal seems to travel between them, some question asked and answered, and she says, "I could have been killed back there."

At this Spock raises an eyebrow.

"Indeed, you almost were."

"I thought I could buy us some time," she says, her voice cracking. "I thought—I thought I could get them to listen. But I was wrong. They were going to kill me anyway. If Harrison hadn't, hadn't—"

She stops herself by pressing the fingers of her right hand against her mouth. Then she looks down, her eyes shiny with unshed tears.

Jim opens his mouth to say something—anything—but Spock beats him to it.

"You are disappointed in your performance," he says, and she nods and looks up at him.

"I failed," she says, her voice full of misery.

"Nyota," Spock says, and Jim has to look away at the intimacy of the word. "You risked your life for the needs of the many. You did not fail, no matter the outcome."

If she replies Jim doesn't hear it. For a few moments he is busy directing the security detail to the brig, making sure Starfleet gets the word that Harrison is captured, that the _Enterprise_ will be underway as soon as Chekov can restart the engines.

Until then they are sitting ducks.

He turns to say so to Spock and sees him fifty feet behind him, leaning into a kiss with the lieutenant.

Again Jim feels like an interloper and he looks away quickly.

But not before sees what he would have missed if he hadn't been seen if before. There it is, a look not just between lovers but between people who have declared themselves family.

Then the lieutenant fairly dances away, lighter on her feet like someone shriven of guilt and blame, with a different understanding of the measure of sacrifice.

And Spock. He pivots in place and watches her go, the way a compass needle swivels north, pulled and bound by forces unseen and magnetic.

It's a scene that stays with Jim as he composes the letters of condolences to Hendorff's and McCabe's next of kin.

"On a ship," he writes, "everyone is family. Today all our families are one in grief."

**A/N: Walking a fine line between retelling what we already know in the movie and skipping around filling in the holes is turning out to be trickier than I imagined! I don't want to belabor the action by retelling what is familiar, but I also don't want to confuse anyone by jumping over too much. I worry that this chapter does just that, since it starts on the morning after the attack on Daystrom and ends after Harrison is captured—in movie time, less than a day. If it was confusing, let me know. And if it wasn't, let me know that, too!**


	5. Baptism

**Chapter Five: Baptism**

**Disclaimer: I do not own these characters nor make money writing about them. Darn it.**

As soon as she walks onto the bridge, Nyota sees Lt. Hannity standing up and vacating the primary communications console with practiced ease. For the past six months they have worked overlapping shifts with the same off-duty day. If they aren't fast friends, they are at least comfortable companions who find their time on duty pleasant enough to occasionally seek each other out for a meal or a conversation when they are free.

Sliding into her seat, Nyota toggles open the dedicated connection to Starfleet and sends the message that John Harrison has been apprehended and confined. To her surprise, she gets no response, not even an automated acknowledgement. _Is the signal jammed?_ She sends the message again. This time the receptor pings. Still, odd that no one sends a verbal reply, though increased security in the aftermath of the attack on Daystrom could be gumming up the pipeline.

From the corner of her eye she notices Hannity giving her a questioning look.

"What?"

"A shower?"

"Oh!" With a start, Nyota realizes that her clothes smell strongly of fuel and dust—and likely are infused with contaminants from the planet. What had Spock told her? That the Ketha Province of Qo'noS had been abandoned because of a plague?

Standing up quickly, she says, "I'll be back soon," as she heads to her quarters.

On the way through the corridors she keeps an eye out for Spock or the captain. Their first task would have been to make sure the prisoner was safely in the brig, but by now they should be on the way back, either to the bridge or doing what she is going to do, shower and change clothes.

Although the corridors are busy—almost crowded in places—she sees neither one. As she palms open the door of her quarters, she has a moment of hoping that Spock is here. The room, however, is dark and silent.

Stripping out of her clothes, she sees scratches and nicks that missed her notice until now. The cut on her forehead is the most tender, but one deep jab on the back of her thigh—probably from the tip of a Klingon _bat'leth_—will need a stitch or two.

Hesitating only a moment, she adjusts the shower from the usual sonic configuration to water, a luxury she rarely affords herself. She tips her face into the spray as the warm water cascades over her.

The last time she had permitted herself to use an extra ration of water this way Spock had been with her—her idea, some silly romantic notion that sex in a shower would be a salve for the rough patch they have traveled through lately. Not just lately, but the entire shakedown cruise—Spock surprisingly guarded even in their private moments, Nyota alternately patient and confused and then alarmed by what in a human would certainly be tagged post-traumatic stress disorder.

That shower had been a disaster. Rather than being aroused, Spock had shivered in the water that was both too cool for his comfort and almost too hot for her to bear. When it became clear that no posture, no gel, no sly or slippery touches were going to make Spock less wet-cat miserable, Nyota turned off the water and fought hard not to let her disappointment and frank irritation show.

Still, as she soaps up and rinses away the acrid smell of Qo'noS, she listens out for the telltale sound of the door lock override. He has to clean up somewhere. Surely he recognizes the layers of meaning in the kiss, knows that whatever lingering anger she had with him has melted away, that she is both offering and asking for forgiveness.

Knows how her willingness to sacrifice herself by approaching the Klingons has shifted her view of what he did in the volcano. How placing himself in harm's way has not been some reckless, thoughtless rush to annihilation but his attempt to serve the common good. How if part of him is so guilt-ridden after the loss of Vulcan, the loss of his mother, that he welcomes death, another part fears it and rejects it—rejects it so completely that he refuses to feel anything about it at all.

His words in the K'Normian shuttle had brought her up short, had called her to task for misunderstanding him.

_You mistake my choice not to feel as a reflection of not caring, while I assure you the truth is precisely the opposite._

As abashed as she felt hearing him, she hasn't had time until now to let the tumblers of her mind click into place—to hear what he is telling her about being in pain.

_What do you need?_ she asked him once, though she sees now that she has been deaf to his answer.

She steps out of the shower and begins toweling the water out of her hair, pinning it away from her face and then slipping on a clean uniform. If Spock were to show up now what would she say? That something changed on the Klingon homeworld? That while she may not comprehend the depth of his despair, she has a better idea—one borne from her own moment of facing the abyss, struggling to call up the proper Klingon phrases, the appropriate tone, the correct attitude to buy them all some time?

The instant that the Klingon warrior had reached out and grasped her—the terror and then the conscious tamping down of her fear—she _gets_ that now, sees how someone could choose to ignore their emotions.

Not _not_ feel them, perhaps like Spock can, but move forward despite them.

She's back on the bridge, back at her station before she sees him again. When he exits the turbolift he glances up at her, a lingering appreciation for their earlier tender moment showing in his expression. His uniform is neatly pressed, his face calm, his hair unruffled. The only hint that he's been in a recent firefight is a small dermaplast on one finger. So, he's showered and changed at his quarters. Any other time Nyota might have felt let down but not today.

She and Spock are not the same, do not respond the same, do not have the same ideas about what it means to be in a relationship. Or rather, what it means to show affection to someone in a relationship. For her, a shared shower. For him, words carefully chosen and saved for when she felt her lowest, when she believed that her efforts and sacrifice were for nothing.

_You risked your life for the needs of the many,_ he told her. _You did not fail, no matter the outcome._

It is the offer that matters. Being willing to live...or to die...in the service of others is proof that he cares. It's what he's been telling her—or what he would tell her if he could.

And now that she knows that, she won't forget it.

X X X

The _Enterprise_ brig is the least private place on the ship. Barely three meters square, one wall of transparent aluminum, the others of triple-reinforced titanium, flanked by surveillance cameras and a manned crew station, it is also more secure than most prisons.

But no prison is impregnable. If and when it suits his purpose, Khan Noonien Singh will find a way to leave it.

For now, however, he waits.

Somewhere on this ship are his crewmates, people who swore to follow him through the dark days of Earth's history almost 300 years ago. Joachim, Jorabeth, Zazreel among them—Augments all, though they rarely use the term to describe themselves, fraught as it is with negative connotations.

Like his genetic heritage, Khan's name is a construction—a symbol of what his creators intended for him—to be a leader like the khans of history. In a world reeling from nuclear border wars and devastating climate change, the geneticists who engineered the Augments believed that only humans who were stronger, faster, smarter could keep humanity from destroying itself.

If Khan knew his birth mother, he dismissed that memory long ago. Instead, he and the other Augments were raised in laboratory colonies, their education extensive, their physical training rigorous.

Stronger, faster, smarter they were. And so ambitious and competitive that by the time he was 12, Khan had witnessed or participated in five murders—not just killings but planned executions carried out for personal gain. Neither the word nor the deed frightened him when it was necessary, though he avoided random, mindless violence, not out of some misguided morality but from simple economics. There were, after all, only so many Augments. Killing one was a loss of a potential lieutenant in his rise to power.

That profitable calculus did not go unnoticed by the other Augments. Some saw Khan's deliberation before action as a sign of weakness and foolishly attacked him. Others applauded his self-control and saw it as evidence of a superior intellect. Those became his corps, people Khan valued for their loyalty even more than for their enhancements.

"We are destined to rule," he told them so often that by the time he was 23, they had collectively established a toehold on the fractured governments in East Asia. By the time he was 30, he dominated a third of the world.

He would have controlled even more if the Eugenics Wars had not begun. Alarmed by the rise of the enhanced humans, the rest of humanity pulled itself together at last and fought their common enemy.

It took three wars spanning a decade to finally defeat them. Sensing the looming loss, Khan spent the last six months of the last war gathering the resources necessary to put together a sleeper ship for his surviving followers. When they launched they had no particular destination—just an unalterable belief that somewhere _out there_ were new worlds to conquer, worlds that needed a strong hand to flourish.

Or if they awoke and found that mankind was, indeed, alone in the universe, they would return to Earth and try again, this time with the lessons of history to guide them.

"We are yours to command," Joachim told him more than once, "wherever you lead us."

Younger than Khan, Joachim was his trusted second. As a toddler he had developed a rare muscle wasting disease, something that cropped up more frequently in the Augments than in the general population. The treatment was prolonged and painful and for several years it left Joachim with a shambling gait that drew unwanted attention. Once when two larger, older boys ganged up on him in the courtyard of their school, Khan intervened, breaking the arm of one and the neck of the other.

"I have been watching you," Khan told him, explaining why he had come to his aid. "I need a good engineer."

Joachim's engineering prowess meant that he oversaw the other 71 Augments as they willingly lay down into their individual cryotubes and submitted to the deepest sleep anyone could know. Then he climbed into his own, nodded once, and left Khan as the last man standing, so to speak, waiting to put himself in stasis until after the sleeper ship was safely out of Earth's orbit and on its way. The last thing Khan remembered was the sharp odor of cinnamon as the lid of his own tube slowly closed, the soporific drugs already making him drowsy.

And then he woke up.

The onboard computer had been programmed to wake him first if the ship ran into trouble or found a planet with suitable parameters. Opening his eyes and breathing deeply, Khan expected one of those two scenarios.

What he found instead startled him. He was prone and bound on a medical bed, three armed officers surrounding him.

"Don't try to move," an older man's baritone voice said. "Otherwise you're just going to get yourself and your crew killed."

The man was Alexander Marcus, an admiral in an organization called Starfleet—what the armed services had evolved into by the 23rd century. Unlike Khan, who was playing catch up on the changes on Earth in the past 300 years, Admiral Marcus seemed to know all about the Augments.

"You're in the history books," the Admiral told him the second time they spoke. "We've known about the Augment sleeper ships, too. Just didn't know where you were."

With a leap of intuition, Khan realized what the admiral was saying, that he had come looking for them.

"What do you want from me?" Khan asked. Admiral Marcus gave an appreciative nod.

"That's right," he nodded. "I need you. Earth needs you. Or at least what you know how to do."

For several days Khan sat through briefings with the Admiral—always under guard, always with the threat of harm to his crew if he didn't cooperate. He learned first about the history of the Federation, of the importance of first contact with Vulcan in the establishment of that peculiar interstellar institution.

"It will never work," Khan declared when Marcus gave him the details. "If, as you say, Vulcans are pacifists, they can never forge a working alliance with such a violent species as humans."

"It already has," Marcus assured him. "Or it did. The loss of Vulcan has shifted the balance of influence on the Council. Those species that share Earth's commitment to self-defense—the Tellarites, for example, and the Andorians, with a history of violence greater than humanity's—are supportive of what I think we need. Proactive defense against people already sworn to destroy us. The Klingons, for one. Warriors who can only be defeated by warriors just as savage. Warriors like you."

In the end Khan had agreed to help Marcus, not because he believed in his claims about Klingon incursions in Federation territory, and not because he had any interest in helping Earth.

But he spent eight months designing a ship that could be run with a minimal number of crew members—fewer than 80—because at some point in the future it would be his to command.

His and his resurrected crew, as soon as he could ferret them away from Marcus, using retrofitted torpedoes to hide the cryotubes.

But it hadn't happened that way. Intercepted before he could finish, Khan had to flee in a stolen jumpship.

"You might as well return," Marcus told him in his last transmission. "You have nowhere else to go and no one to go to."

So that was that. As he had threatened, the Admiral had destroyed the Augments...or so Khan believed at the time. His reply was swift and furious—the attack on Section 31, the decimation at Headquarters.

_An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth._

Not simplistic revenge but ancient justice codified by several religions. The Admiral could hardly be surprised.

Yet it wasn't the Admiral who came looking for him. Rather than bringing the full force of the dreadnought Khan had designed to hunt him down, this puny ship has been loaded with the torpedoes, the young human captain apparently unaware of the true nature of the cargo.

_A puzzle._

As is the Vulcan officer who attends him. When Khan first saw Spock on the surface he directed his question to him, certain that he would not lie.

"How many torpedoes?"

After a beat—waiting for his captain, perhaps?—the Vulcan had said the unbelievable.

"Seventy-two."

_What game was Marcus playing?_

When Khan rigged the transwarp pad for a series of hops across the quadrant before arriving at Qo'noS, he had been certain Marcus would follow, provoking exactly the war he claimed he wanted.

The _Vengeance_ would do considerable damage. Might even decimate the Klingon fleet.

But the victory would be hollow. No warrior people would let a first strike go unanswered, even if the answer was slow in coming. Eventually the Klingons would attack Earth—and whether or not Khan was there to capitalize on it, he no longer cared. Without his corps, he would be hard pressed to rule.

Now he stands under the running water of the brig's not-so-private shower, sorting through the rapid change in what he knows. Why was the _Enterprise_ sent here, and how does that serve Marcus' plan?

There's only one answer, of course, and turning off the shower and dressing himself in the Starfleet issue laid out for him, he looks around at the transparent aluminum wall, the reinforced titanium, the bank of cameras. Breaking out would not be impossible but it might not be the most efficient way to catch the captain's attention, to convince him that he is a clueless pawn.

Walls can be broached, but breaking down human resistance is far more satisfying.

Now to wait until the captain comes to him. As he will. As he certainly will.

**A/N: Thanks for reading! And your reviews keep me going!**


	6. The Borrowers

**Chapter Six: The Borrowers**

**Disclaimer: I only borrow these characters for my own purposes—none which includes making money!**

"Drop it!"

Scotty hears the guttural voice at the same time that he feels a phaser in his back.

Not just any phaser, but a modified C-217 Landwic Special, judging from the characteristic helix-shaped scope on the end of the cold metal barrel.

"Hey, laddie!" he says, darting a glance over his shoulder as he raises his hands. "There's no call for that, now!"

The bearer of the phaser is an off-worlder of a type Scotty doesn't recognize, a tall, gangly creature with several large protuberances poking up from its skull. A popular universal translator often sold on the ring colonies hangs around its neck. Four arms, or the equivalent—one holding the Landwic Special—are lifted in Scotty's direction looking more than a little menacing.

"Drop it!" the alien says again, and Scotty obliges by letting his handheld scanner fall loudly on the concrete floor.

They are standing inside a large civilian hangar. Immediately in front of Scotty—and the object of his attention until he was interrupted—is a mid-size runabout, large enough to get him to the coordinates Captain Kirk gave him but not so large as to require flight plans or travel permits.

Down both sides of the hangar are personal flitters stored by individuals and at least two commercial hoverbuses that have seen better days. At the far end of the hangar is a garage workstation for diagnosing mechanical problems.

It's also the spot where Scotty had assumed the night patrol stayed, watching the feed from the surveillance cameras he and Keenser were careful to avoid when they jimmied the lock and came inside.

He'd already spent a frustrating two hours trying to hire transport. Breaking and entering into a parking facility had been the action of desperation.

"Looky here," he says, swiveling around slowly, his hands in the air in the universal sign of surrender. "I wasn't going to steal anything. I just wanted to borrow this runabout for a few hours. I'd have it back good as new in no time. Better than new, actually. See, I found a loose catalytic connection—"

"Cease talking!" the alien says as he waves the phaser in Scotty's face. "You will be turned over to the local authorities."

"No, wait!"

From the corner of his eye he sees a small flicker of gray—Keenser dodging silently between two of the closest flitters, unseen by the alien.

"I haven't done anything wrong, mate." Scotty keeps his eyes forward, peering into the light sensing organs that pass for eyes on the alien. "No need to report to anybody."

"Your purpose was to take one of these vehicles without offering remuneration," the alien says in slightly stilted Standard. "I have no options other than to alert the local law enforcement."

"There are always options," Scotty says, slowly lowering his hands and hopefully directing the alien's attention away from Keenser who is making his way forward. "Let's call it a rental fee. I borrow this runabout for a few hours. I get it back before the owner even knows it's gone. What would that cost, say?"

"Unacceptable," the alien says, brandishing the phaser.

"Whoa, there," Scotty says, moving back.

From behind the alien Keenser takes another step. Flicking a glance at him, Scotty can just make out something in his hands.

Not a weapon, surely? If the Roylan thinks he can take on the tall alien in a fight—

It's Keenser's fault he's in this mess at all. There Scotty had been at The Bay Bar, a place too trendy and hip for his taste, drinking his third Miridian Sunset or some such ridiculous cocktail—_whoever heard of a bar that didn't serve decent Scotch_—and the Captain had called, fairly crawling on his hands and knees in apology.

Jim Kirk, admitting he made a mistake.

And then asking for a favor, as if Scotty was barmy enough to forget that the _Enterprise_ had warped out of Space Dock less than an hour after he'd been forced to march off in protest. Forced! His good guidance ignored, Kirk not even hearing Scotty's larger concern about what the hell Starfleet was doing sending the ship out like some military strike force.

Not just any favor, either, but one that required transport to coordinates on the other side of Io, Jupiter's closest moon. Easy enough to get to if he had the time and money, but difficult on short notice. And for what? Kirk had been vague on the comm call.

_I have a feeling you'll know it when you see it._

What was that supposed to mean? _Now_ the captain trusted his judgment?

No. Scotty was having a good time—or a reasonably good time—right here in the bar. It was too much to ask him to head off to _who knew where_ to find _who knew what_. He slammed the comm shut and shook his head.

Keenser's protuberant eyes clicked from left to right in that annoying way he had of sizing things up wordlessly.

"Going?" Keenser said, almost too low for Scotty to hear him over the music.

"He shoulda asked me before I had three of these," Scotty said, raising his empty glass.

Keenser continued to stare at him.

"He didn't say it was an emergency!" Scotty said.

Keenser dipped his head.

"Don't give me that look! He let you go, too, you know! Let us both walk right off that ship. He can find someone else to do his royal bidding!"

To most people, Keenser appeared to have a stonelike visage, his face unmoving, his expression unchanging. But Scotty had spent enough time alone with him on Delta Vega to have a sort of sixth sense about what the Roylan was communicating. Perhaps it was all that time in such a forsaken landscape with nothing else to do, but Scotty and Keenser could look at each other and say volumes.

Or Keenser could. Scotty still tended to say volumes out loud. Often. Loudly. With enough contrariness that Keenser knew he was more than halfway teasing him.

"Needs you," Keenser said, and Scotty sighed.

"Oh, alright, but not another word. I can't stand your nagging."

They sat for another half hour in the bar while Scotty called the nearest transport hire companies. When the seventh one claimed not to have anything available, they left the bar and walked to the eighth one, a small private business on Marina Boulevard that Keenser had used before.

"Emergency," he told the proprietor, but the only available vehicles were too small to make the jump to Jupiter.

Looking sympathetic, the owner said, "You might try one of the apartment garages. They might be willing to rent to you."

Something in the owner's voice suggested such a strategy was a long shot. As they walked down the boulevard, Scotty made the decision not to waste their time.

"You know the old saying," he said. "Better to ask forgiveness than permission. Let's borrow something. That's almost the same as renting."

If he expected Keenser to point out that it was also almost the same thing as stealing, he was gratified that he said nothing but kept pace as Scotty scouted out the area.

The first private garage they came to was double locked and had an obvious alarm system in place. The second one was more promising, with a rusted gate and an old-fashioned chain and padlock on the doors. One good whack ought to open it. Scotty looked around on the ground for a rock or a stick but Keenser was quicker. With a soft _snick_, the lock opened in his hands.

"How'd you do that!"

"Gift," Keenser said, shrugging.

The inside of the garage was dark except for light filtering in through several small windows along the roofline. Even in the dim light Scotty could see that none of the vehicles stored there had enough engine capability to get him out of Earth's orbit, much less all the way to the coordinates.

With a sigh, he led the way back outside.

The second garage they broke into was actually empty. Standing in the doorway, Scotty threw his hands up in disgust.

"I'm going home," he said. "If the captain wants those coordinates checked out so badly, he can find someone else."

As he turned to leave, he caught a glimpse of Keenser, his arms crossed across his chest, his disapproval palpable.

"Oh, alright! One more," Scotty said. "I'll try one more. And if that doesn't work—"

But the next one seemed promising. At one end of the hangar was a Starfleet runabout, or what used to belong to Starfleet. Sometimes small ships were sold to the public after they were decommissioned. This one looked like a workhorse, scuffed and well-used, but a quick scan showed that the engines were sound and the fuel cells in surprisingly good shape. The storage bins held several fireproof travel coveralls, though none small enough for Keenser.

"Aye, this might do," Scotty said. "Finally our luck is changing."

And then the alien put the phaser in his back.

"What d'you say?" Scotty says, trying to sound reasonable, unsure what Keenser is planning as he inches closer to the alien.

"Unacceptable," the alien says, his tone unmistakably irritated. "I will bind you now until the authorities arrive."

"Wait," Keenser says. Whirling around, the alien takes a moment to locate the little Roylan. Keenser holds up something in one hand.

"Found this," he says, his eyes darting from the alien to Scotty and back again.

At once Scotty knows what it is. Drug infusers—probably loaded with something illegal. Not probably. Definitely, from the way the alien reacts.

"Give me that!"

"Already scanned," Keenser says, holding up his comm. "Information in queue."

"His comm queue has an automatic cycle sequence," Scotty improvises. "If he doesn't turn it off manually, it sends out everything he's put there. Tell you what, matey. Let me borrow this runabout for a few hours, and Keenser there won't tell anyone what you've been hiding in here."

The alien is clearly torn. On one hand, he's responsible for the care and safety of the vehicles in the hangar. Letting one out could cost him his job. On the other hand, if he's running illegal drugs on the side—

"How do I know you won't turn me in as soon as you leave?" he asks.

"Hmm," Scotty says, rubbing his chin. "Would you take my word for it?"

"Me," Keenser says. "I'll stay."

"Ach, no," Scotty says. "I might need you. I don't know what I'll find out there."

"No deal," the alien says.

"But that means you're keeping my man as a hostage!"

"Collateral," the alien counters. "When you return, he can leave."

"I have half a mind to turn you in now!" Scotty says with genuine anger in his voice. Keenser flinches.

"Go ahead," the alien says. "And you won't be going anywhere tonight."

With a sigh, Scotty turned to Keenser.

"What do you think?"

Keenser takes a step closer.

"Go."

"You sure?"

"Hurry," Keenser says. "Hurry back."

"It's probably nothing," Scotty says, trying to sound reassuring. "Just the captain with a bug in his ear. I'll run out there and take a peek and be back here in a jiffy. An hour. Two, max. You won't even notice that I'm gone. It's not like I'm going to find anything important on the far side of the moon."

Later they will laugh about that comment—or Scotty will. Keenser will shake his head, baffled as he always is by the promises humans never seem to be able to keep.

**A/N: Thanks for your thoughtful comments. You help me become a better writer!**


	7. Voices Near and Far

**Chapter Seven: Voices Near and Far**

**Disclaimer: I do not own these characters nor profit financially from writing about them. I do, however, profit by having fun!**

If he hadn't seen it for himself, Scotty would have scoffed at the idea of a Federation starship this large. But here it is, tethered by access tubes and power lines to the inside of the even more enormous building facility on the far side of Jupiter.

So many work flitters, repair sloops, and tugs are buzzing about that Scotty has no trouble slipping his borrowed shuttle unnoticed into the ship's hangar bay, an area twice the size of the Academy parade grounds near the Presidio. He waits until several uniformed workers pass by before unlocking his shuttle and making his way to one of the hangar exit doors where he listens for footfalls.

Hearing nothing, he slowly enters a dark gray corridor. The lights are low, though Scotty has the distinct impression that the lighting is always low, as if this corridor is seldom traveled—not just now while the ship is in dock but all the time.

Odd for a ship to be so sparsely populated, especially a ship this size.

The corridor is regularly intersected by narrow cut-throughs leading to work stations. The first one Scotty comes to is a simple electrical terminal. The next one is more complex—probably a part of the life support system, though without a proper scanner he can't be sure.

As he walks he debates whether or not he should quietly sneak back to his shuttle and head home. Surely he has enough to report by now.

_You'll know it when you see it,_ Jim Kirk had told him when he sent him here to these coordinates.

But no. There's something off-kilter about this ship—something more than the lack of crew, the forbidding size, the dim lighting—but Scotty isn't yet ready to say what isn't quite right.

He decides to walk further before turning back. At the very end of the corridor he sees a magnetically sealed casement with a digital pad embedded in the wall beside it. Controlled access to the weapons bay? A closer look confirms this. What kind of weapon needs this sort of security? And what kind of crew can't be trusted with it?

Beyond this corridor is a narrow equipment-filled room that stretches as far as Scotty can see. A monitor draws his attention and with a quick glance around to make sure no one has followed him, he sidles to the row of blinking lights and panels.

Phaser modulators, schematics showing power levels, and an auto-correct relay are easy enough to identify, though if Scotty is reading them right, the phasers they control are far more powerful than anything on the _Enterprise._

Scooting around the display, he glances over an adjacent one and is startled to see more phaser controls. How many phasers does a single ship need?

As he moves slowly down the room he makes a mental note of the other controls. Not only phasers but photon torpedoes, shield generators, and some unidentified defensive power grids are apparent, the controls slaved to a remote switch, possibly on the bridge.

Which would explain why he hasn't seen more crew, why this ship, vast as it is, is designed to be run by only a handful of people.

_A doomsday weapon._ That's what this ship is. And the fewer people who know about it, the better—or why would it be constructed in secret?

Scotty shivers despite the heat.

It's unmistakably a Starfleet vessel. The templates for the controls, for the workstations, are familiar to anyone on a Starfleet starship. They are, however, also different enough that Scotty assumes they incorporate alien technology—or else prototypes that haven't been shared yet with the rest of the fleet.

"The captain needs to know—" he mutters, but even as he does, he moves on down the room, looking for something that isn't connected to weapons. Surely there's a science lab, a research kiosk, even a bloody recreation room or a galley somewhere to prove him wrong about the singular purpose of the ship.

_Nothing._ It's a war machine, pure and simple. Just as Scotty had worried to Jim Kirk when he was ordered to load those blasted mystery torpedoes on the _Enterprise._

"This is clearly a military operation," he had complained. "Is that what we are now? Because I thought we were explorers."

If this ship represents the future of Starfleet, the days of exploration are over.

With a snort of disgust, he turns to head back to the hangar bay when the deck begins to vibrate. Placing his hand on the nearest bulkhead, Scotty knows immediately what is happening. The ship is at warp.

So much for getting away now. Wherever the ship is going, he is, too.

Pulling out his communicator, he opens it and considers trying to piggyback a message onto the ship's beacon. At this distance it's unlikely that Keenser's personal receiver can pick him up—and without knowing his destination, Scotty isn't sure what he could ask Keenser to do. Get in touch with the _Enterprise_? She's either on the way to or from Qo'noS by now, and probably incommunicado. He'll just have to find somewhere to hunker down and hide until the ship drops out of warp.

The regular tattoo of footsteps interrupts his thoughts and Scotty scurries awkwardly behind one of the phaser stations. Two uniformed officers stride by, neither one looking around. After they disappear around a bend, Scotty breathes normally again.

Before he can stand up to scout out a better hiding place, the mechanical hum of the engines stops suddenly. The ship's inertial dampeners mask most of the forward motion, but Scotty knows the sounds and feel of a ship too well not to realize that they have come out of warp and are maneuvering on thrusters.

It's maddening not to know what they are up to. If he could only see—

_Of course!_ With a stifled yelp, Scotty flips open his communicator and presses his thumbnail to the back panel, prizing it off. Slowly twisting the signal transceiver, he searches for the ship's video feed to tap into. The small screen on the front of his comm flickers with gray and black lines before resolving into an actual image—the same one the bridge crew will be looking at on the forward view screen.

At first Scotty sees nothing unusual—just the dark background of space, distant stars visible. But then to the side he catches sight of the _Enterprise_, her running lights illuminating the bow and sketching the outline of her distinctive saucer.

As he always does when he sees the _Enterprise_ from a distance, Scotty lets out an appreciative sigh.

_Well._ All the confusion will be explained now that Kirk is here. Standing up, he prepares to make his way back to the corridor to find the nearest turbolift. He'll head to the bridge and surrender with his apologies. The captain of this monstrosity will undoubtedly be annoyed to find out he has a stowaway, but Scotty is certain that Jim Kirk can talk him out of any serious trouble.

"Just sent him to take a look," he can imagine Kirk saying. "Sorry for the inconvenience, but no harm done."

The deck vibrates again, this time more violently than before, and Scotty has to throw his hands out to keep from falling over. The tiny image on his comm is a blue blur of warp contrails. For a moment he is baffled, but then he realizes: the contrails belong to the _Enterprise_, and this ship is in pursuit.

Not only in pursuit, but somehow—unbelievably—catching up to the _Enterprise _while in warp. That shouldn't be possible. Engineer that he is, Scotty knows this. But he also knows that engineering principles are not hidebound, and are, in fact, often surpassed. Witness his own transwarp beaming pad. How many people told him it wasn't possible?

The reason they are out here at all is because of a madman who used it to hop across the galaxy to Klingon space.

The ship gives a lurch that knocks him to his knees.

Stumbling to his feet, his is almost knocked over again as the ship shakes once, twice, and yet again. Behind him, Scotty hears the telltale whine of phaser banks discharging.

_Bloody hell!_ They're firing on the _Enterprise!_

On his tiny comm screen he confirms the worst. Spinning like a lazy top, the _Enterprise_ shows definite signs of phaser fire on the starboard bow. One of the nacelle struts has scorch marks tracking on the leading edge. As he watches in horror, the _Enterprise_ looms large as the monster ship moves forward.

_Going in for the kill._ Scotty's head buzzes with the contradiction—one Starfleet ship firing on another.

And not just on any ship, but on _his_.

With a frantic motion, Scotty stumbles back up the center of the room, searching for the power coupler that is linked to the phasers. Not this, not that! This! He slides to a stop in front of a recessed panel marked with several warning labels and grabs the release bar. At first nothing happens but then slowly, slowly, it starts to open.

In the distance he hears the telltale whoosh and _snick_ of a sealed door opening and shutting—then the sound of running footsteps coming toward him.

Pushing the power coupler door almost closed, he steps behind the station and crouches, listening as the steps come closer.

A few meters away they stop.

Has someone seen the open panel door? Holding his breath, Scotty waits.

And waits.

He's about to gasp for air when the footsteps start up again and pass by. Scotty catches a glimpse of the top of a crew member's head from the rear just as he finally is forced to take a breath.

One more minute—another _snick_ in the distance as a door is opened and the footsteps fall away—and he hurries back to the panel and yanks it open.

Beneath his feet the deck judders, as if some huge machinery is being deployed.

Reaching up and putting both hands on the control bar, Scotty pulls until the bar snaps down with a satisfying thud. At once the juddering in the deck stops. The whine of the phaser feedback falls silent.

In the tiny image on his comm screen, the _Enterprise_ hangs in space.

Close enough for his communicator to reach without a piggyback signal? He decides to try.

"_Enterprise_, can you hear me? Guess what I found on the other side of Jupiter!"

x

"Mr. Spock."

"Mr. Spock."

On the viewscreen, an oddly familiar face nods. In the captain's chair, Spock struggles not to acknowledge the curious glances from the bridge crew. Even if he had addressed his elder as Selek—the name he adopted when he joined the Vulcan diaspora on New Vulcan—their resemblance is too uncanny not to go unnoticed.

If unremarked upon. The crew might be surprised by what they are seeing, but they are far too professional to comment on it.

That's one reason Spock has opted to have this conversation here on the bridge instead of in the privacy of the ready room. If his elder finds his choice unusual or uncomfortable, he gives no sign.

The odds are high that the elder Spock will have little to say that is helpful—not because he knows too little but because he knows too much. In anyone else, such a wealth of knowledge and experience would be invaluable, a rich resource of wisdom. The elder Spock, however, has stated more than once that this universe must unfold in its own unique way without his interference.

"You are familiar with the concept of Schrödinger's cat?" he said to his younger counterpart the second time they spoke after the destruction of Vulcan.

"A metaphorical construct to explain quantum entanglement," Spock had said promptly. "A cat inside a box is both alive and dead until the act of observation collapses one of those realities."

"Precisely," the elder Spock said. "Just so for us as well. Your future is open to multiple possibilities as long as I do not observe it. You must be free to make your own choices without any consideration to what my own decisions were—or are."

"I am not a cat," Spock said, a hint of a smile in his eyes. The elder Spock lifted one brow.

"I have already given you too much direction as it is," he said, shaking his head. "My suggestion that you remain in Starfleet was motivated by my emotional state at that time—though I do believe that your personal well being is best served there. Be that as it may, however, I will refrain from such advice in the future."

And so he had. In fact, they have only spoken twice since then, both times during large gatherings where they were unable to share more than a few words together.

So Spock is not surprised when at first he seems to deflect his query about Khan, when his elder reminds him—unnecessarily—of his insistence that Spock walk his path alone…that he remain the unobserved cat.

But then the older man goes on and gives such a dire warning that Spock feels the tension in the air ratchet up.

"Khan Noonien Singh will not hesitate to kill every single one of you."

Even now Jim Kirk and Khan are somewhere on the large warship after a harrowing space jump through a debris field. Since Kirk first told him his plan, Spock's intuition has been like a steady, growing alarm in the back of his mind. Now the alarm is almost deafening.

"Did you defeat him?"

The image on the view screen buckles slightly with interference before showing the elder Spock nodding ruefully.

"At great cost, yes."

Already he has given more information than Spock expected, yet he has to ask the most important question.

"How?"

For the rest of his life Spock will remember the remainder of this conversation as a pivotal moment in defining who he is, who he becomes. At the time, however, he is too concerned about the safety of the ship and crew to fully understand the importance of what the elder Spock tells him.

It sounds at first like a popular speculative fiction tale—a group of super humans frozen for hundreds of years and set adrift in a sleeper ship accidentally awakened by a Jim Kirk as impulsive as his own. Khan their leader, charming and arrogant in equal measure—and ultimately mutinous, marooned on a distant backwater planet where he and his fellow Augments can live out their remarkable lives without being a danger to anyone else.

Or so Captain Kirk had reasoned.

The backwater planet—Ceti Alpha Five—beautiful but harsh, was knocked out of orbit by the explosion of a sister planet, becoming a wasteland that would have killed anyone other than an enhanced human being.

Then remarkably the tale takes a turn—another Starfleet crew stumbling across the survivors who commandeer their ship and steal a device so powerful that it can completely wipe out life on a planet and remake it to preset specifications. Called Genesis, it is the brainchild of Dr. Carol Marcus.

When the elder Spock mentions her name, Spock is startled. Behind him sitting at the communications console, Nyota lets out a gasp.

_Is it possible that the universe is attempting to weave itself together into a familiar tapestry?_

The elder Spock seems to note their surprise. He pauses briefly and then continues.

"In our attempts to aid the crew of the other ship and regain the Genesis device, the _Enterprise_ was badly damaged. The warp core was offline and thrusters were working at 30% of optimal efficiency.

"Fortunately for us, as brilliant as he was, Khan was not the strategist the captain was. We took the _Enterprise_ into a nebula where our sensors were inoperative—and Khan brought the stolen ship, the _Reliant_, in after us.

"Soon enough we were able to double back and disable the _Reliant_ with our phaser fire, but not before Khan activated the Genesis device he had aboard, knowing that the _Enterprise_ would also be destroyed when it detonated."

He pauses again as if looking into a distant scene, which, Spock thinks, he probably is.

"Without warp capability, the _Enterprise_ could not escape. Everyone aboard would die."

Suddenly without knowing how he knows, Spock is certain where this story will lead—how the elder Spock sacrificed himself to repair the reactor and restore warp drive before the ship could be consumed in the Genesis explosion.

"I was the only one who could effect the necessary repairs," the older man says quietly, thoughtfully. "But doing so took my life."

For a moment the only sounds are the ambient noises of the bridge—clicks and whirs and chirps of monitors and relays.

"I hope you never have to make the same choice," he says. From the corner of his eye, Spock sees Nyota shift in her chair.

"I have already said too much," the older man says, looking directly at Spock, "or I would explain how restoring my life cost us all so much more than anyone could have imagined. For now, what you need to know is that you cannot beat Khan through your strength alone. He believes that no one is stronger, and he may be right. But he also believes that no one is smarter, and there you can prevail. He can be tricked, sold a ruse, lied to, and he will not see it coming."

"I cannot lie," Spock says promptly, faintly horrified at the older man's words.

"Then redefine what it means to lie," the elder Spock says. "Because you cannot beat him except through your own cunning, Spock. Unless you are willing to try, your ship and everyone on it is already lost."

**A/N: Thanks so much for reading and reviewing. You help me improve every time you let me know you are still on board.**


	8. The Scream

**Chapter Eight: The Scream**

**Disclaimer: I do not own these characters, but I take credit or blame for everything else.**

The forward viewscreen on the bridge goes dark. In the command chair, Spock steeples his fingers and stares silently into the middle distance.

Around him, McCoy hears the crew quietly checking their monitors and doing their jobs, but the tension is palpable. With a sudden motion, Spock rises and moves toward the communication console.

"Lieutenant," he says, looking intently into Uhura's upturned face, "I need you to assemble all senior medical and engineering staff in the weapons bay."

Uhura's face reflects the surprise McCoy feels, but she doesn't question the odd orders.

"Alright," she says, turning to her display. Spock steps back towards the command chair where McCoy is standing.

"Dr. McCoy, earlier you inadvertently activated a torpedo. Do you think you can replicate the process?"

For a split second McCoy is at a loss for words. Then he hears himself bluster, "Dammit, man, I'm a doctor, not a torpedo technician!"

"The fact that you _are_ a doctor is precisely why I need you to listen very carefully."

Leonard McCoy struggles to rein in what at some level he knows is his knee-jerk annoyance with Spock. Yes, the man is brilliant, but he's also so damned irritating that McCoy often hears himself replying before his mind has time to catch up. He's not proud of that, but there it is.

Normally reserved to the point of seeming frosty, the Vulcan first officer leans so closely into McCoy's personal space that the doctor flinches.

"As you undoubtedly heard," Spock says, flicking his eyes quickly to the forward viewscreen, "Khan is not trustworthy. The captain and Mr. Scott are in grave danger."

McCoy opens his mouth to reply but Spock hurries on.

"As are we. Once Khan and the boarding party have neutralized the threat of Admiral Marcus, he will attempt to recover his crew. I propose that we assist him."

McCoy's face flushes.

"Are you out of your mind! His crew are like him, Spock, a bunch of megalomaniacs! Augments who believe they are stronger, better, smarter than the rest of us. And you know why they believe that? Because they are! And more violent, dangerous, despotic—"

"Those facts are not in question, Doctor—"

"Then the last thing we need to do is hand them over to him! Imagine what will happen when he wakes them up. Universal Armageddon!"

From her comm station, Lieutenant Uhura calls out.

"Commander, I've alerted the engineering crew to report to the weapons bay, but the intercom connection to the medical hub on deck seven is down. I can't get in touch with the medical staff there."

"Lieutenant Hannity," Spock says. McCoy sees Hannity turn with a quizzical look from her long-distance scanner. Something indefinable passes between Spock and Uhura—a look given and received, and with it a message. Standing up, Uhura directs her comments to Hannity.

"Take over here. I'll go to deck seven and alert the lab personnel."

Without a backward glance she heads into the turbolift as Hannity replaces her at her station.

"Time is at a premium, Doctor," Spock says to head McCoy off. "You will proceed to the weapons bay to explain to the engineering crew what you did that armed the torpedo."

Despite Spock's caution about time, McCoy lifts a hand to interrupt him. Spock narrows his eyes and glares in obvious annoyance; McCoy lowers his hand and takes a breath instead of saying anything.

_So much for that myth about emotionless Vulcans._

"It should then be a simple matter for the engineers to set a timing device for detonation," Spock says. McCoy's hackles go up at once.

"I can't believe you, Spock! I know they are Augments, but they are still human beings. You're just going to blow them all up!"

Spock knits his brows together and the corners of his mouth turn down a fraction.

_He's irritated? Well, he should be!_

"Doctor, moments ago you said the Augments were too dangerous to wake, yet now you argue—"

"I _know_ what I said! It doesn't change the fact that killing Khan's people is immoral."

"I concur," Spock says, and McCoy does a double take.

"You do? Then what—"

"Once engineering has control of the detonation process, your medical staff will remove the cryotubes carrying Khan's people. Store them in sickbay, but leave the torpedoes in the weapons bay."

Suddenly McCoy understands and a slow smile crosses his face.

"You sneaky bastard," he says appreciatively. "When he comes for his people—"

"I will give them to him," Spock says, finishing his sentence.

X X X

Nyota waits until the last group of medical personnel from deck seven enter the turbolift before she joins them. When the doors open onto the weapons bay and they exit, she stays in the lift, intending to take it to the bridge. Instead, Dr. McCoy catches a glimpse of her and calls out.

"You in a hurry?" he says, and she slips out of the lift into the cavernous weapons bay.

"What do you need?" she says, but the doctor rushes ahead without answering.

The weapons bay isn't a place Nyota visits often. As large as an exercise gym, it is dominated by a huge robotic arm that slides along a track in the ceiling. Along one wall of the bay are photon torpedoes held apart by metal stanchions. The opposite wall is part of the outer hull and is punctuated by torpedoes already loaded in their tubes.

Right now a group of engineers are gathered around a torpedo resting on a pallet. As McCoy comes up, one of them—Lt. Shera, a Deltan woman Nyota knows from poker nights at the Academy—looks up and hands him a PADD.

"We're still having trouble," she says, shaking her head. "As soon as we try to disarm the torpedo, the cryotubes power down. When we try to shift the power source, the cryotubes ignore the feed. It's like they refuse to even talk to our systems."

"That's why I need you," McCoy says, shoving the PADD at Nyota.

With a start, she says, "I'm not an engineer!"

"You heard the lieutenant," he says. "These torpedoes are telling the cryotubes to turn off. And then the cryotubes aren't speaking to the _Enterprise_. I need to you help them communicate."

"Machine language doesn't work like that of sentient beings!" Nyota says, genuinely flustered.

Without missing a beat, McCoy says, "Machine languages were all _invented_ by sentient beings. And the torpedoes have an encryption key that's keeping us from being able to access their programming. I'm betting Khan wrote it and put it in place."

"But—"

"And I'm betting you know enough about translating one language into another to help these engineers figure out how to get these two systems to start talking to each other."

"But—"

"At least take a look at it," McCoy says, tapping his finger on the PADD in her hands. His eyes drill into hers until she reluctantly nods.

Glancing at the diagrams, she sees immediately why McCoy thought she might be able to help. Rather than looking like typical encryption programming, it is an old style substitution cipher, written in what looks like a vaguely familiar Earth language. A Cyrillic alphabet, perhaps? Toggling the zoom switch, Nyota zeroes in on the script.

Not Cyrillic but a pastiche of the Arabic alphabet and something fanciful and spiderlike. Something with a whiff of unreality, as if a fiction writer had made it up.

_Could it be—elvish?_

All around her the engineers and medics are buzzing like bees, but Nyota tunes them out. Wracking her brain, she tries to remember everything she can about the languages created by fiction writers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Long before Zefram Cochrane's first contact with Vulcans, fiction writers had imagined a powerful race of creatures with pointed ears and more-than-human strength. Unlike real Vulcans, however, these were fictional elves. In some novels their elvish languages were described in loving and elaborate detail, something Nyota had marveled over as a young girl.

_Surely Khan wouldn't—_

With a flick of her thumb, Nyota calls up a copy of J. R. R. Tolkien's _The Lord of the Rings._ There in the index is a description of Sindarin, one of the elvish languages. Scrolling through the lexicon, she looks for a match with the encrypted code.

Yes! She can make out the word that means _immortal._ The code is definitely written in elvish Sindarin. Now if she can sort out what it means.

Nyota begins tapping in a decoding algorithm but the PADD is slower than a direct link to the ship's computer. She needs to get to an access point.

At the engineering console, Lt. Shera and two redshirted engineers are huddled over a monitor.

"I may have something for you," Nyota says, and all three swivel in her direction. "I think this is the kind of code people used several hundred years ago. It replaces normal programming language with this."

She holds out the PADD and places her finger on the elvish transcription.

"What is it?" Lt. Shera asks, and Nyota shrugs.

"I think this is what the programming code looks like when elves write it."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Never mind," Nyota says. "Help me run it through the ship's computer."

Her hunch is right. Less than a minute later, she hands Lt. Shera the encryption key, and a minute after that, she hears one of the medics say, "Got it! The cryotube's still up and running."

Suddenly the room is a hive of buzzing activity again. Engineers kneel before the torpedoes inputting the deactivation codes into the control panels, releasing the seals and exposing the cryotubes inside.

Other engineers tug the cryotubes free, placing them on a moveable pallet for easy transport to sickbay. The medical staff attach power packs to each one and check to make sure the temperatures inside the tubes do not fluctuate.

Once the torpedoes are emptied, they are resealed and their firing sequence reset.

Nyota stays long enough to be able to report each step in detail, and then she heads to the turbolift.

"Oh, no," McCoy says, intercepting her. "You aren't thinking about leaving, are you? We have 72 of these things to deal with. We can use you."

Hesitating for a moment, Nyota looks around at the frantic pace.

Taking a breath, she says, "Tell me what you want me to do."

"Come with me to sickbay. We need to make sure we get these tubes stored safely."

Taking her elbow, he shepherds her into the turbolift for the short ride to sickbay. Already it is almost full of cryotubes, looking like eerie sarcophaguses lying on the biobeds and on the floor.

"Go down this row," McCoy says, waving her forward, "and make sure each one is still operational. I don't want to accidentally defrost anyone."

She's halfway down the row when the ship gives a sudden lurch. Another power failure? Possible, after all the fire they took from Admiral Marcus' ship.

Again the ship shakes, this time so hard that the cryotube closest to her visibly rocks back and forth. Then a series of jerks—the deck wobbling beneath her feet.

Spock's voice comes over the intercom.

"All decks, brace for imminent proximity detonation."

This time the ship rocks so hard that Nyota is slammed to the deck, one banged knee bringing stars before her eyes. Making her way shakily to her feet, Nyota tenses, waiting for another sudden motion. _Nothing_. Whatever was shaking the ship has stopped.

The door to sickbay whooshes open and Captain Kirk stumbles in, his right arm supporting Dr. Marcus. Bringing up the rear is Scotty. All three look bruised and disheveled.

Hurrying to Dr. Marcus, Nyota reaches out to keep her from toppling over and leads her to the nearest empty bed.

"I'm okay," Dr. Marcus says, wincing. She's obviously not okay, but Nyota doesn't have time to spare. She has to get back to the bridge.

First, though, she finishes checking the row of cryotubes before heading to the door. Before she gets there, her stomach drops as the artificial gravity gives way and the ship starts to roll. The warning klaxons begin to sound.

"Emergency lockdown!" McCoy yells. "Strap yourself in!"

Nyota reaches for the nearest safety harness, a wide tether attached to a med console. With a sickening yaw, the ship twists and turns, jars and boxes tumbling from shelves. Someone screams in pain.

Her heart hammering in her throat, Nyota struggles to slide into the safety harness. She has one arm in when the ship begins another roll to the side. Hanging on to the straps, she feels her body lifting from the deck as the ship tumbles.

When it rocks back to the other side, she lands hard on the deck. Slipping her other arm into the harness, she presses the catch closed. Only then can she get her breath.

The ship is obviously badly damaged if the stabilizers are inoperative. Next to life support, the ship's stabilizers have priority over every other system. Even life support seems iffy, the lights flickering wildly and the temperature starting to rise.

Beating back her panic, Nyota tries to imagine what is happening on the bridge. Spock is there, of course, and Sulu and Ensign Darwin at the helm. She feels a wave of dismay that she is here in sickbay instead of at her post.

Closing her eyes, she reaches into her mind for any echo of Spock that she can find there—an artifact of the times they have melded. Sometimes when she least expects it she feels his presence, almost as if he is looking over her shoulder, or she feels a rush of warmth on her face, her hands, as if he is physically close.

"Your imagination," he assured her when she asked him about it once, but she had the unmistakable conviction that he wasn't sharing all of the truth with her.

The ship rolls and shudders. The klaxons hurt her ears, and now she catches a faint whiff of smoke.

_We're going to die. _

For the second time in one day she knows this as sure as she knows anything.

An image streaks across her vision like something both real and imagined—the Earth spiraling up through a blanket of clouds.

And then she knows. This is what Spock sees on the viewscreen. The _Enterprise_ is falling out of the sky.

All at once the flickering lights steady and hum to life. The ship gives one final shake like a dog after a bath and then rights itself. Nyota's stomach stops reeling and she knows that the artificial gravity has kicked back in. For a moment she doesn't move, waiting to make sure that the reprieve isn't temporary.

In the distance someone lets out a yell of relief.

With a tug, Nyota unhooks the safety harness and pulls her arms loose. She stands and waits for a moment to regain her balance before heading to the door. This time no one stops her and she makes her way to the nearest Jeffries tube, not bothering to try the lift. The bridge is only one deck away but her banged up knee slows her progress up the ladder.

At last, however, she climbs out. All around in the corridor are crew members with various injuries, some of them serious. Broken tiles and pieces of plastiform paneling litter the deck.

Anxiety shortens her breath and makes running harder, but she pushes herself forward toward the bridge. At last the door looms up and she reaches out to it. As she does, it opens and there's a blur of blue and black as Spock runs past her, his hand barely brushing her own.

_Relief that she is not badly injured, that she has made her way back to the bridge—_she feels that through his touch.

_And relief that the warp core is functioning again, that the ship isn't going to burn up in free fall while reentering Earth's atmosphere—_she knows at once that this had been, in fact, a very real possibility.

But overlaying his relief about the ship, over the intense affection and longing that is a constant underpinning of his feelings for her, over the ghost of grief that he has carried around since losing his planet and his mother—over everything else, Nyota feels the bright, sharp edge of his fear.

"Where—" she starts to say, but Sulu answers her before she can finish.

"Engineering," he says. "I think it's the captain."

Nyota tries to take a step toward her station but her feet are too heavy to lift, as if she is nailed to the floor. Placing her hand over her heart, she feels it beating an alien tango.

From the comm station Hannity says, "Are you alright? Uhura?"

She's not alright. Not at all. She stands immobile by the door, her face flushed, her eyes swimming with unshed tears.

_Tears that are not just hers._

_Spock!_ she calls out silently. There it is again, the conviction that she sees what he sees, knows what he knows, as if in one corner of her mind he is always there, like a dim light hidden at the end of a corridor.

And more than that—she knows what she has never known before, that part of her is tucked away in his mind, rarely acknowledged, like a keel on a sailboat, somehow helping him stay upright.

"I—" she says, startling herself. Hannity and Sulu turn to look. "I, I have to—"

"Go," Sulu says, and Hannity nods.

In two steps she is through the bridge door and pelting back down the corridor. This time she sees far more than before—_looking through Spock's eyes?_ As she passes crew members wrestling to repair broken access panels and assist the wounded to the nearest medical bay, she hears a steady, persistent tally in her head: 2.7 hours to replace the main power coupling on deck four; the hull breach on the starboard bow will require a month in Space Dock; 17 crew are unaccounted for; the air exchanger is working at 43% efficiency.

This is how Spock sees the world, with a layer of complexity that would distract most humans.

Turning a corner, Nyota spies the opening door of an arriving turbolift. She bolts inside and presses the button to the engineering deck.

Her heart is still hammering so hard that she feels lightheaded, almost dizzy.

_Don't lose control now,_ she tells herself. Tells them both.

Yet despite her determination, she feels a rising well of shared sorrow. Closing her eyes, she is flooded with images of dusty red rocks swirling beneath her feet as if she is seeing everything from Spock's point of view—Amanda Grayson's keening cry pitched above the roar of the destruction—

Another scene. A sensation of falling, a river of steaming lava flowing around a rocky outcrop where she is suddenly on her back, skittering to the edge—the realization that she is beyond recovery, that the mission will be compromised if she doesn't ignite the cold fusion device she and Scotty have designed to stop the supervolcano from erupting—the sadness when she picks up the control and sets the timer, and the choice to set aside that sadness and wait for the inevitable—

And yet another image—this one inside the K'Normian shuttle, crouched low inside to keep the Klingons from spotting her and the captain as they wait—

"You will incur the wrath of Lieutenant Uhura as well," she hears herself say, her words masking the very real terror she feels as she is forced to watch the brave young woman outside—

Opening her eyes, she is relieved to see the turbolift walls around her. Her face is wet and she stifles a sob.

The turbolift door hisses open and she looks out into engineering. At the other end of the room she sees Scotty in a work coverall. Behind him she can barely make out Spock kneeling before the warp containment door.

Already she is too late.

The images of loss and destruction, from Vulcan to the _Enterprise_ in shambles, crowd her mind as she runs forward.

And now joining them is the image of Jim Kirk, his mottled face staring into nothingness.

It can't be. It can't be.

But even as she says this, even as she wishes this, her anguish overwhelms her.

Jim Kirk, who annoyed the hell out of her at the Academy, who played fast and loose with regulations, who lost his ship because he saved Spock—

She bumps into Scotty's shoulder and he reaches around and encircles her with his arm. She hides her face in his chest but feels her mouth opening, ready to shout out in grief.

But Spock beats her to it—his cry of anguish and fury so unhinged, so unmoored and uncontained that the hum and whir and staccato beats of the engines fade into the background.

**A/N: Two apologies are in order. First, I am sorry for the tardiness of the update. The last chapters will be swifter in coming. And secondly, I apologize for showing bits of actual scenes. When I wrote the missing parts without at least a little bit of the scene as it appears in the movie, it was difficult to follow. I hope the slight repeat is an acceptable compromise.**

**Thanks for continuing to read and review. The movie has left my local Cineplex but is still pulling in viewers in the large city nearby. If you haven't seen it more than once, it holds up well on a second view (or third, or ***** cough * more).**


	9. Beat the Clock

**Chapter Nine: Beat the Clock**

**Disclaimer: The "missing pieces" of this story are mine. Everything else is borrowed for no profit at all.**

All the way from engineering to the bridge, Nyota runs in Spock's wake, stepping around debris in the corridors and skidding on loose tiles and broken pieces of plastiform. Just as the bridge doors sense their approach and start to open, the _Enterprise_ shudders so violently that Spock throws out one hand to right his balance and Nyota almost falls forward.

"That was close!" she hears Sulu call out. The forward viewscreen shows a blur of black and gray smoke. Sulu's hand dances over his console and the screen image changes to show the huge ship plummeting to Earth below.

In fascinated horror everyone on the bridge watches as the ship lumbers out of the sky, shearing off the old prison at Alcatraz before tilting crazily into the bay. The momentum takes the saucer section forward into several of the bayfront skyscrapers, toppling them and sending a wall of water into the crowd of retreating pedestrians.

Finally, finally, the ship comes to rest among a roiling cloud of smoke and dust, the skeletons of buildings collapsing around it.

"Search the enemy ship for signs of life," Spock says, his voice oddly raw. Sulu swivels in his direction.

"Sir, there's no way anyone could have survived that impact."

"_He_ could."

Nodding, Sulu says, "Yes, sir. Got something. One life form. Whoa! He just jumped 30 meters!"

Sulu's facial expression echoes his tone of voice.

"Can we beam him up?"

From his position at navigation, Chekov shakes his head.

"He's moving too fast to get a lock on him. But I might be able to beam _you_ down."

An electric current judders up Nyota's spine and she feels Spock's unspoken question. Turning, she sees his eyes searching her face.

Gone is his resolve to feel nothing, to set aside the emotions that almost overwhelmed him on the day he lost his planet, his mother, felt again when he watched Admiral Pike die. Gone is his concern that she will be angry with him for risking his life, for running into danger as a way of running from his own grief.

But gone, too, is his willingness to proceed without taking her feelings into consideration.

Not that he needs her permission or even her approval—but he does need her understanding. He isn't willing to lose that again.

_Nyota?_

"Go get him," she says, and without looking back, Spock dashes off the bridge.

Moving to her station, she opens a channel to sickbay.

"Dr. McCoy," she says, her voice almost a sob. "It's the captain—"

"Uhura?" McCoy says. "What's going on? Where's Jim?"

"Mr. Scott is bringing him to sickbay," she says, unwilling to speak the words that will make the captain's death real. "He's—he went into the warp containment field. They're decontaminating the area now. Scotty asked me to tell you."

She swallows hard and says, "To let you know…before you see him."

X X X

Carol Marcus winces as Dr. McCoy presses a hypospray to her knee.

"Sorry," she says, and then because he gives her a startled look, she adds, "I was raised in Hertfordshire. Old habit, apologizing for making someone uncomfortable."

"I thought I was the one making _you_ uncomfortable," McCoy says, eyeing the gauge on the hypospray before tucking it back into his medkit.

"Yes, I know. It's just—"

With a wave of her hand, Carol exempts herself from saying more. It's too complicated to explain middle-class British sensibilities to an American without sounding like a stereotype.

Or sounding like she is rehashing her own parents' cultural missteps—her English mother's polite deference irritating her blunt American father to the point of crossness.

_Just say what you mean, for God's sake,_ he would say, imploding a dinner conversation while Carol looked on. _That's the problem with people today. No one wants to take a stand._

In the end her parents had been two people better off apart—Alexander Marcus settling in an apartment near Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco, her mother accepting a post at Haileybury boarding school teaching A Level biological sciences to the Sixth Form.

When Carol was young and her father was a captain away on a starship, she spent more time in the UK than the US, but when he accepted a promotion and a desk job at headquarters, Carol moved into his apartment on North Point Street near the Presidio.

She fell in love with San Francisco at once and with Starfleet almost as quickly—the city a vibrant, diverse mishmash of Earth cultures intertwined with a large alien population, and Starfleet, if anything, even more diverse. If she had stayed in England she would have followed in her mother's footsteps as a biologist or biology teacher. Once she moved to San Francisco, Carol knew she was headed to Starfleet Academy.

She could have pursued her first love—xenobotany—in Starfleet, of course. In fact, botanists were in high demand on spacefaring vessels.

But in a funny way, her sometimes fraught relationship with her father led her in a different direction towards an expertise in weaponry. Most evenings the two of them shared duties making a meal, usually while discussing—or in her father's case, arguing about—whatever non-classified news had come across his desk that day.

"Don't let anyone fool you," Admiral Marcus said on more than one occasion. "We're going to be caught flatfooted if we don't take threat assessment seriously."

He railed against the Federation's bias for budgeting exploration over security—a utopian naïveté that would get them all killed, he said.

"We've lost our way," he told her. "A hundred years ago—two hundred—people knew how to arm themselves better than we do today. Believe me, Carol, it's going to cost us in the future."

Not that she agreed with everything her father said, but Carol had the growing conviction that helping to keep starships safe—even ones concerned primarily with exploration—was the best use of her time and talents. By her senior year at the Academy, she had narrowed her focus to torpedoes and was running an independent research project with a manufacturer in Brazil.

Then the next two years she worked in Starfleet's R & D in while she finished her graduate degree and kept an eye on her father's new prototype torpedo program—until her access was suddenly cut off, her questions unanswered, her father strangely hard to reach.

Of course now she knows why.

No time to think about it, she tells herself as all around her the _Enterprise_ medics scramble to help crew members injured when the ship was swung around like a top in Earth's gravity well. An image of her father—Khan bent over him, his hands pressed to his skull—threatens to undo her if she lets it. Blinking back tears, she sits up and scoots to the edge of the biobed.

"Where do you think you're going?" Dr. McCoy says. Carol slips off the bed and tests her weight on her leg. So far so good. The sharp pain in her knee is reduced to a dull throb.

"You look like you could use some more help."

She starts forward to a nurse struggling to assist a wounded crew member to a chair. Behind her she hears the doctor say, "I can't argue with you about that."

For several minutes Carol keeps her focus narrowed on the problems at hand—a technician with a badly lacerated finger, an ensign burned when fire broke out in the auxiliary control room. Despite her wobbly knee she makes herself useful fetching and carrying and holding equipment for the medical personnel.

She's picking up the pieces of plaster wrappings and straightening one of the med bays when she hears the room go silent. All of the murmurs stop. No one moves.

Slowly she turns and sees four security officers, their fingers looped through the handles of a large body bag that they carefully, almost reverentially, place on the nearest biobed. Following behind like a funeral mourner is Scotty, his face flushed, his eyes stricken.

_The captain._

As she watches, Dr. McCoy unzips the bag and pulls back the coverlet, exposing the captain's discolored face.

She's known Jim Kirk only a day but she feels a stinging at the back of her eyes, a pressure in her chest.

In another life she would have been dangerously attracted to him—would have been at risk of becoming part of his _story_, his reputation. She had known that the minute she introduced herself on the shuttle—saw his unearthly blue eyes meet hers and crinkle slightly at the corners, as if he was letting her in on a private joke.

If they had met under ordinary circumstances, if she hadn't been quaking in her boots afraid that her forged transfer was about to catch her out, she might have fallen under the spell of those eyes, that smile.

She feels a pang of remorse for tweaking him earlier—for mentioning Christine Chapel and implying that her transfer was because of him. Of course it wasn't. Carol had kept in touch with Christine since they roomed together her second year at the Academy. In her letters from the _Enterprise's_ shakedown cruise Christine never once mentioned the captain.

His first officer, on the other hand—

"She transferred to the outer frontier to be a nurse," Carol told Kirk, not untruthfully. "She's much happier now."

Still, misleading him that way was unfair, and even her annoyance when he ogled her in the shuttle as she changed into work coveralls didn't quite make up for it. He was, she had decided then, just an immature boy.

Now she looks at his unnaturally still body and sees not a boy but a man.

Dr. McCoy lets the coverlet go and makes a noise of disgust in the back of his throat. With a jerk he sits down heavily on a lab stool and rests his forehead on his hand.

And then Carol hears it, a trilling purr, like bubbles in a straw or a noisy kitten.

McCoy starts up like someone electrified.

"Get me a cryotube, now!"

For a moment Carol is confused. Following the direction of McCoy's gaze, she sees a fuzzy tribble on the lab table, the noise clearly coming from it.

She isn't the only one confused. The medic nearest to the doctor says, "A cryotube?"

"The tribble!" McCoy says. _Surely he doesn't mean that he wants to put the tribble in one of the crytotubes? Why would—_

"It was dead!" McCoys shouts, throwing his hands in the air. "I injected it with some of Khan's blood. Now look!"

And all at once Carol understands what he intends.

Is it possible? She glances around at the captain. How long has he been without brain function? Three minutes? Four? Would the radiation affect the rate of decay?

"I can help," she says, realizing that she knows as much or more than most of the people in the room about the cryotubes. She moves to the cryotube where two medics are struggling with the controls.

"Here," Carol says, hitting the necessary sequence of numbers on the control pad. The cryotube unseals with a hiss and two medics pull the sliding pallet out, exposing the frozen Augment inside.

"Keep him in an induced coma!" McCoy calls across the room. "I'm going to put Kirk inside. It's our only chance of preserving his brain function."

"How much of Khan's blood do you have left?" she asks, anticipating the next step.

Picking up an empty hypospray, McCoy gives a dour look and says, "None."

Then with the flat of his palm he smacks the intercom button.

"Sickbay to Spock! Spock!"

Nothing. Not even the buzz of interference.

The medics finish sliding the captain onto the cryotube pallet and McCoy nods at Carol.

"Activate the cryogenic sequence," he says, and she keys in the initiation sequence. Almost at once the tube seals and frost forms on the small plate glass, fogging her view of the captain's face.

"McCoy to bridge," the doctor says into the intercom. "I can't reach Spock from sickbay. Listen to me. I need Khan alive. You get that sonofabitch back on the ship right now. I think he can save Kirk!"

X X X

"Can you beam someone down?"

Nyota isn't sure if she is more frightened or relieved when Chekov taps his screen and says, "I think so."

"Sulu," she says. It's not a request but a statement.

_I'm going down there._

From the corner of her eye, Nyota sees Sulu open his mouth to respond, can see from the cant of his brow that he is going to turn her down.

"We don't have time to argue about this," she says, cutting him off. "You heard what Dr. McCoy said."

Every week for at least a year, Nyota had played poker in one of the Academy underground games, usually with Sulu and Leonard McCoy in the medical school dorm. It was valuable practice—not just in playing cards, but in getting a read on her adversaries. She can tell that Sulu doesn't want to let her beam down into danger, but she also knows that if she presses her point, he will relent.

"Spock must be in trouble," she says, punctuating her point by turning her palm upright, "or he would have Khan in custody by now. You have to let me go."

For a beat more Sulu waits. Then he turns to Chekov.

"Can you?"

"They must be on a transport," the young navigator says. "They are moving so fast. But, yes. I can get her there."

"Go," Sulu says, and Nyota pelts out the door and down the corridor to the transporter room.

"Phaser!" she shouts to the security officer inside the door. He hesitates only a moment before unstrapping his sidearm and handing it to her.

"I'm sending coordinates now," Chekov says over the intercom, and Lt. Doohan at the transporter controls punches them in.

"Good luck!" he calls, his voice ringing in Nyota's ears as the transporter room is replaced by the surface of the automatic garbage scow.

X X X

The lights in the hospital corridor are dimmed for the evening and most of the visitors have left by the time Carol Marcus is comfortable enough to try to fall asleep. She feels a little silly taking up a private room with nothing more than a torn ACL and broken knee cap, but the medics who triaged the wounded _Enterprise _crew were insistent.

It's just as well, Carol thinks ruefully. She has to climb steps to get to her apartment, something she will have trouble navigating for awhile. And although her father's apartment is at ground level on North Point Street, she knows she won't be able to face going there any time soon.

Thinking of her father brings a lump to her throat and tears spring to her eyes.

She'd managed to hold herself together earlier during a preliminary briefing—a JAG officer coming to her bedside to ask questions that sounded unreal. Things about what she knew and when she knew it—how much her father had confided in her—and why she was aboard the _Enterprise_ when there was no record of her assignment there.

She knows she will have to answer more completely and face a reprimand about the forged transfer papers.

That worry, however, pales in contrast to her concern about Jim Kirk.

She had been in sickbay when Khan was brought in—unconscious, his face crisscrossed with cuts and bruises, his arm fractured in two places. Spock stayed long enough to see McCoy prep him to draw blood, and then he left abruptly despite the doctor's insistence that he, too, needed medical attention.

Carol has no doubt that the doctor would have pulled rank to get him back for observation—except that the clock was ticking and no one was sure if what McCoy proposed for the captain would actually work. The data suggesting it might was sketchy, to say the least—a single letter from a suicidal Section 31 officer saying that Khan's blood had reversed his daughter's incurable disease, and McCoy's own little experiment with a dead tribble.

Not much to go on.

Still, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain if it works.

From her corner of sickbay Carol had watched as McCoy drew several vials of Khan's blood and took them into his lab, leaving the other medical personnel to set Khan's arm and deal with his other injuries, keeping him sedated.

Soon enough she heard Spock's voice over the intercom announcing their approach to Space Dock, and shortly after that, his command to secure stations and prepare to disembark.

The injured crew still in sickbay were the first to be taken off the ship, transported directly to Starfleet's hospital facilities near Headquarters and the Academy.

"I need you," McCoy told her as he motioned to two engineers charged with moving the crytotube carrying the captain. "Don't let him out of your sight. I'll follow you down as soon as I finish testing this vaccine."

Her arrival at the hospital is a blur. She remembers following the cryotube to one of the operating theaters, McCoy dashing in soon afterwards. Vaguely she recalls leaning against the tube to take the weight off her knee, her hand shaking as she punched in the code to reverse the freezing process.

"We've got this, Dr. Marcus," someone said, shepherding her out of the way as the crytotube unsealed and Jim Kirk's body was removed and hooked up to life support monitors.

The last thing she saw as she was led away to have her knee attended to was Leonard McCoy hovering over a computer readout as one of the medics adjusted an IV.

No word yet on whether or not it will work—though Carol realizes that she won't be the first to know. She's not a member of the crew—not really—not like these people who have worked together for months, learning to trust each other like family.

The pain medication pulls at her wakefulness and she closes her eyes, willing herself to stop thinking, but an almost inaudible susurration, like silk rustling over polished wood, catches her attention. Someone in the hallway outside her door? She opens her eyes and sees the silhouette of a tall Vulcan, his profile revealing distinctive ears and hairstyle. Beside him is a shorter woman with her hair pulled back into a high ponytail.

_Commander Spock and Lt. Uhura._ Of course. She remembers the Commander refusing medical attention earlier in the day. Apparently the lieutenant has prevailed on him to be more sensible.

Carol closes her eyes again.

"Spock tells me I have you to thank," a deep male voice says.

Not the Commander's voice, Carol thinks, opening her eyes again. The tall Vulcan shifts slightly, bringing his face into the light. An older man, his features lined and his hair streaked with gray, his posture and movements so like the Commander's that they might be related.

The lieutenant looks petite next to him, her chin tipped up.

"We're a team," she says, and even in the dim hall light, Carol can see that she is smiling.

"For this I am grateful," the Vulcan says. "And for you."

Lt. Uhura dips her head down and nods.

"Thank you," she says.

For a moment both are silent and then the Vulcan says, "You have a place to go when Spock finishes here?"

"Oh!" Lt. Uhura says. "I hadn't thought about that. He gave up his faculty housing when we left for the shakedown cruise. The housing office at the Academy might still be open. I'll call and see if they have some dorm space—"

"My home is yours," the Vulcan says. "I leave with the Vulcan delegation for the Federation conference in Paris within the hour, and I suspect I will be away for some weeks. Spock knows the entry code. That is, assuming the doctors do not want to keep him here tonight."

"They might," Lt. Uhura says, a note of playfulness in her voice, "but that doesn't mean he will do what the doctors say. You might be surprised to hear this, but he doesn't always do what he's told."

"A Vulcan trait," the older man says, unmistakably bemused. "Or so I have been informed."

**A/N: Welp! I apologize again for repeating some lines from the movie…but again, I needed to give some context for things I wanted to show. Thanks for being so forgiving!**

**Thanks, too, for sticking with this story and sending reviews my way. I appreciate them all. They truly keep me writing.  
**

**Almost done! Keep an eye out for the last chapter soon.**


	10. Preparations

**Chapter Ten: Preparations**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing here. Enjoy this free stuff!**

The English River that gives Riverside, Iowa, its name curlicues through flat farmland before emptying into the larger Iowa River on its run to the Mississippi. Once when he was a young teenager, Jim Kirk kayaked from Kalona to River Junction, not because the river held much interest in itself, but because it crossed restricted Starfleet property. From several bends in the river he could get close enough to the shipyard silos to make out individual workers on the scaffolds of two starship saucers being assembled there.

Having grown up with the hazy blue silhouettes of the shipyard silos on the horizon, he looked without actually _seeing_ them until he was old enough to understand that his mother's frequent absences and his father's permanent one were somehow connected to what was being made there—starships, majestic and dangerous—and because of that, more alluring than anything else in his life.

Before he ran into Christopher Pike and his cadets traveling on a barnstorming PR recruiting tour through the Midwest, Jim had given up on Starfleet as an option. His mother, Winona, was disappointed that he didn't apply, but she knew her younger son had probably done too much, had too checkered a legal record, to be able to gain admission to the Academy.

When he wasn't serving time in the juvenile detention center in Sioux City, Jim lived alone in the farmhouse where he grew up. His mother was deployed on survey missions along the Outer Rim, her expertise in stellar cartography giving her a choice of assignments, most of them taking her off-planet for at least six months at a time.

His older brother Sam left home early for the Martian Colony, finding a job as a knockabout repairman, easy work for a farm kid looking for a space adventure. One rare summer when both Jim and Winona were home on the farm at the same time, Sam made a surprise visit with his new bride, a pretty, curvaceous brunette with such luminous hazel eyes that Jim walked around miserably aroused for the three weeks they were there.

"Aurelan and I want to start a family right away," Sam announced one evening at dinner, and Winona pointed her fork at him and said, "And just how do you plan to afford a baby on your salary?"

"I won't," Sam said quickly. "I'm starting to school when the new quarter begins. There's a xenobiology program at the Martian University I'm enrolling in—"

Winona's fork clattered to her plate.

"Tell me you're joking."

From across the table, Jim watched Sam's face cloud over. Sitting beside Sam, Aurelan folded her hands in her lap and looked down.

Sam had always been the good child, the dutiful son, the one who had gotten along with Frank before Winona divorced him. Running off to the Martian Colony had been the most rebellious thing he had ever done. At least until now.

"What's wrong with that?" Sam said irritably. "When I finish the program, I can get a position with a research team—"

"Then why start a family now?" Winona was clearly miffed that Sam had turned up suddenly with a wife in tow. "You're both too young to make that sort of decision. And if you are starting school, you don't need the distraction."

Aurelan spoke up then.

"We've been saving money," she said, glancing from Winona to Sam and back again. "And Sam will finish the program in two years. We have enough to live on until then."

"But a baby is a big decision," Winona said, her brow creased, her lips thinned. "You've always been so level-headed, Sam. It's not like you to be this impulsive."

Although she didn't look in his direction, Jim knew he was being referenced. _It might not be like Sam to be impulsive, but Jim—_

Sam slipped his hand into Aurelan's. "It's not your decision," he said, and then softening his tone, he added, "Besides, it's too late."

The room went silent. Then Winona took a breath and let it out noisily.

"You're pregnant."

Her tone was flat and weary, as if someone had leached all her energy away.

"It'll be okay, Mom," Sam said.

It had been, too. Against all odds, or perhaps to spite them, Sam and Aurelan were happy together. When their first son, Peter, was born and the young family came back to Iowa for a short visit, Winona seemed to forget any reservations about what her firstborn was up to, instead mooning over the new baby with such an undisguised crush that Jim was almost embarrassed for her.

A year later when Sam finished his degree, Aurelan was pregnant with their second son and they stayed on the Martian Colony, Sam taking a job with a terra-forming company. By then Jim was at the Academy and Winona had taken a posting on a deep space explorer. The farmhouse was boarded up and empty for the next few years.

Now that he takes a Starfleet shuttle from San Francisco to Riverside Shipyard at least twice a week—sometimes more—to check on the progress of the materiel and parts being machined to repair the _Enterprise,_ Jim has opened up the house again, preferring to stay there instead of in Fleet housing at the yard. The solitude suits him.

The _Enterprise _herself remains at Space Dock, her berth a veritable beehive of activity. Scotty practically lives there, keeping quarters on the visitors' deck, keeping an eye on work being done to his beloved engines.

Spock, too, seems to spend an inordinate amount of time on Space Dock overseeing the repairs. Every time Jim goes up he runs into him, even though Spock has also taken a temporary teaching assignment at the Academy filling in for an Andorian professor who is on emergency leave from the language department.

The rest of the crew have scattered as well—Sulu helming the _Reliant_ on milk runs shuttling supplies to New Vulcan, Chekov getting an additional certification in warp physics at some off-world university Jim's never heard of.

Sometimes he stops by Uhura's office at headquarters and they go to lunch and commiserate—he about the inevitable bumps in the pipeline to getting the _Enterprise_ ready to launch, and she about working as a liaison between Starfleet and the civilian media. Like the rest of the scattered crew, they know their situations are temporary, that when the ship comes back on line they will gather again for her rechristening.

The person he sees the most is Bones, though the doctor often cancels on him when emergencies come up at the specialty hospital where he's doing a rotation in an alien ward.

"If I'm going to be traipsing around the galaxy for five years, I better get ready to run into some weird shit," he told Jim when he accepted the post.

For the most part, however, Jim spends his free time alone. The women he meets are beautiful and interesting—at first. But at some point during that first conversation, he catches a whiff of off-putting hero-worship or notices his own attention starting to wander.

"Don't worry about it," Bones told him. "You've been dead. It takes some time to figure out how to be alive again."

Compass plants and butterfly milkweed and purple prairie clover are in bloom when Winona and Jim and Sam are again under the same roof. Three sons later, Aurelan is still attractive, though Jim is relieved that his youthful lusty thoughts have been replaced by his genuine regard and appreciation for how she and Sam work as a team to raise their boys.

The occasion is their imminent departure for Deneva, a remote planet near the border of the Beta Quadrant. Both Sam and Aurelan have jobs waiting for them there—Sam as a research biologist, Aurelan working with a child nutrition program. They will be gone for years and Winona has organized this reunion before they leave.

In the past year Jim and Sam have made a tentative rapprochement, calling each other and sending mail, getting to know each other in a way they never would have thought possible when they were two unhappy children competing for their mother's scarce attention. The first night that they are all back together under one roof, the brothers stay up later than everyone else, drinking good wine and sharing funny stories. As they head up the stairs to their bedrooms, Sam says, "You know, Dad would have been proud of us, I think," and Jim nods, remembering the elderly Spock's words on Delta Vega.

_He proudly lived to see you become captain of the Enterprise._

For months Jim has avoided thinking about anything other than the immediate future—has kept his focus on getting the ship ready for launch, has marked time by watching the bayside buildings destroyed by Khan slowly going back up.

The time with his mother and brother bring him full circle to the past again. For the three days of the visit, they speak of it often, until Jim is finally able to recount for them the horror of having crewmembers die under his command, of pleading with Admiral Marcus to spare the rest of them, of knowing all their lives were forfeit if he didn't give up his own.

Somehow being able to speak of such things breaks a spell Jim hadn't realized needed to be broken.

On the day Sam and his family are scheduled to depart, the adults stand outside as the boys run around in the yard breaking off stalks of switchgrass and waving them like swords. The prairie stretches out in all directions, and with a start, Jim realizes that he's suddenly tired of the view.

And lonely, too.

For the first time he understands why his mother keeps returning to space, how she can feel burdened by the gravity of Earth.

"I'll miss you so much," she says to Sam, running her hand along his shoulder blades. "Your boys will be grown the next time I see them."

"You can always visit us on Deneva," Sam replies, but Jim knows that such a visit is unlikely. So does his mother, who blinks back tears.

Turning to Jim she says, "And you! Heading off for five years. At least Sam will have his family with him. You'll be all alone."

She steps to his side and leans into him, her gray-blonde hair tickling his cheek.

"Hardly alone," he says. "And I will have family with me. I have my crew."

X X X

4.87.

That's how many seconds it takes before Sarek looks up from his computer monitor and sees Spock standing in the doorway of the embassy office.

4.87 seconds is sufficient time for Spock to notice that his father has lost weight—at least four kilos since he saw him last. Now his cheekbones are in sharp relief, his hair more noticeably gray.

Normal ageing, of course, accelerated by grief and stress.

As soon as he sees his son, Sarek rises and crosses the distance.

"Forgive the interruption," Spock begins, but Sarek makes a small motion of dismissal with his hand.

"It is never an interruption to speak with you," he says, leading the way down the corridor to the break room where a pot of tea is always waiting. He fills two cups and takes them to a small round table beside a window with frosted glass, the muted light creating a pleasing, calming atmosphere.

For a few moments both men are occupied with settling into their chairs. From the corner of his eye Spock sees that his father is watching him, apparently content to wait for his son to begin the conversation.

"I was uncertain," Spock says, "if I would have a chance to speak with you tomorrow at the rechristening."

When Sarek doesn't reply, Spock goes on.

"The _Enterprise _may not return to Earth for some time. I wanted to take my leave of you in private, and in person."

Sarek nods slowly and lifts his tea mug to his lips, taking a measured sip.

Hesitating another moment, Spock waits to see if he will respond. When he doesn't, he goes on.

"A year ago we sat here and you told me that you approved of Captain Kirk's violation of the Prime Directive," he says.

"I said that I was glad the outcome saved your life," Sarek amends. "That is not the same thing as approving the action itself."

To his surprise Spock feels a flush of embarrassment that his father has chastised him for being imprecise.

"I stand corrected," he says, struggling not to give himself away. "However, I now find myself in your situation, disapproving of an action that has rendered beneficial results."

"Explain," Sarek says, setting his cup on the table and crossing his hands in front of him, as if he is prepared to listen even more intensely that he already is.

"Dr. McCoy's vaccine," Spock says, and Sarek nods.

"You owe your captain's life to it," he says.

"And for that I am grateful. But I also have serious reservations about what happens now. The Federation may decide to exploit the Augments in a way that is both unethical and dangerous."

"You are not alone in your concerns," Sarek says. "But this is not an issue that can be resolved quickly. I suspect it will continue to be a topic of discussion for some time."

"But it should be resolved," Spock says, again struggling not to show the emotions he feels—his growing frustration and genuine alarm.

"And it will be, in time," Sarek says. "The more complex the issue, the longer it takes to unfold. That's as true in diplomacy as it is in our personal relationships. You must cultivate patience."

Clearly the Augments are a topic his father does not wish to discuss with him now. Repressing a sigh, Spock tries to take his advice.

How often had he heard his parents dance around in the same dynamic, his mother insistent that something needed to be done, his father counseling a wait-and-see attitude.

"Be patient, Amanda," Sarek would say when she fretted over her slow blooming flower beds, when she worried about Spock's lagging social life at school, when she chafed at Vulcan traditions that felt more limiting than liberating to her.

She reacted to such advice the same way every time, bristling out loud. Sometimes she left the room noisily or became very silent for a day. On those occasions Spock knew his father had to take his own advice—waiting for Amanda's good humor to return, and more often than not, facilitating its return with a gift. Rare words of affection, perhaps, or a small token offered to speed up the process.

As it always does, thinking of his mother unsettles him, and he peers closely at his father, wondering if he, too, is troubled by dreams of her.

Spock finishes his tea and stands up, taking his cup to the cleaning bin. Following him, his father does the same and they head back toward his office.

"Do you have much to do to prepare for tomorrow?" Sarek asks, and Spock says, "The _Enterprise_ will be ready to launch on time."

Although Sarek's expression does not change, Spock can see that he is amused.

"Forgive my _imprecision_," Sarek says, making clear that he recognized Spock's embarrassment earlier about being called out for it, "but I meant what do you have to do to get _yourself_ ready before tomorrow."

"For the ceremony, nothing," Spock says quickly. The captain is scheduled to speak, but Spock only has to be in attendance, nothing more. "And my personal effects are already aboard."

With a start, he realizes that he does have something else to do.

Lifting one brow, he says, "You remind me that I do, indeed, have one more errand. A trip to the pottery shop on Kober Street to buy a replacement mug for Lieutenant Uhura. I was on my way there a year ago when we received news of the attack in London."

They are standing at the end of the short hallway that leads to the front door of the embassy. Sarek raises his hand in the _ta'al _and says, "Live long and prosper, both of you," and Spock returns the gesture and turns to leave. Not until he steps out into the late afternoon sunlight does he register how unusual his father's words are, how they break with accepted practice and tradition.

_Both of you._

As he heads to Kober Street he imagines handing Nyota the mug and seeing her face light up with the kind of undisguised pleasure that she shows him when he surprises her. It takes so little to make her truly happy—a touch to her hand, a whispered endearment in her ear. That image quickens his breath and makes him slightly aroused.

He'll get back to his apartment before she does—McCoy is assembling some of the crew for a send-off party at Moe's, his preferred location for public consumption of alcoholic beverages—and Nyota has indicated that she will go.

But soon enough she'll be back, and when she returns, he will show her the mug and strongly suggest that they have a private celebration.

Until then he simply has to follow his father's advice and be patient.

X X X

"Over here, Lieutenant!"

As soon as she enters the bar, Nyota sees Leonard McCoy waving her over to his table. The bar is still fairly empty, with only two other customers sitting together in a booth.

"Did I get the time wrong?" she asks as she settles into the chair next to his. Before she can answer, a waiter is at her elbow and she points to the glass in the doctor's hand.

"I'll have the same," she says and the waiter nods and melts away.

"They'll be here," McCoy says, frowning. "I hope."

"Well, Spock isn't coming," Nyota says. "At least I don't think so. He had a meeting at the Vulcan embassy."

She pauses and then adds, "But he probably wouldn't have come anyway."

Immediately she's sorry she spoke, her words sounding more critical and annoyed than she feels. She was disappointed when Spock wouldn't commit to coming with her to this pre-launch get-together, but she appreciates how uncomfortable these social gatherings make him feel, how draining they are.

"Not his cup of tea," McCoy says, lifting his glass to his lips. "Or rather, not his bourbon."

Nyota gives a rueful grin at his attempt at a joke. She doesn't like laughing at Spock's expense, even in this lighthearted way. It makes her feel disloyal.

From behind her she hears a soft rustle as the waiter leans forward and sets down her glass.

"You two okay?" McCoy asks abruptly, and for a moment Nyota debates telling him off for springing such a personal question on her or thanking him for caring enough to ask. She decides on the latter.

"We're good," she says. "We're still…finding our way. You know, like any couple."

She says this lightly, hoping to deflect his concern. McCoy, however, frowns and takes another sip of his drink.

"Not every couple finds their way," he says, rattling the ice in his glass. "Look at me."

They've had variations of this conversation before, McCoy growing morose when he thinks about his failed marriage, his daughter he rarely sees.

He always ends with some cautionary words for her, something along the lines of _don't make the same mistakes I did_, words she takes to heart, even if she feels that the challenges she and Spock face are unique, beyond the sphere of the ordinary.

Part of her uneasiness today is nerves, of course, and excitement about the _Enterprise's_ rechristening tomorrow.

But another larger part of her roiling emotions comes from Spock himself, his own deep concern about what Starfleet is doing with the Augments. Just last night he had been almost agitated after meeting with the staff admirals at HQ.

"Admiral Keen told me that keeping the Augments in the central storehouse was preferable to isolating them in an undisclosed setting," he told her as they ate a late evening meal of reheated soup. "Such an action is extremely ill-advised."

"At least in central storage they will be well guarded," she said, trying to sound reasonable. Spock sat ramrod straight, one hand holding his spoon, his other palm flat on the table like someone having to anchor himself.

"They require additional security beyond what central storage offers," he said. "Now that the regenerative properties of their blood has been publicized, the number of parties interested in obtaining it is incalculable."

Nyota put down her own spoon and said, "But all that publicity—all those Starfleet press releases explaining how difficult it is to actually use that blood. That long explanation that reporter did about how long it takes to make the blood usable. Surely that makes it clear that the blood isn't some magic elixir, that it's actually really hard to work with."

She was talking about a flurry of reports that came out soon after Jim Kirk's story made the news. One explained how the vaccine made from Khan's blood basically jumpstarted Jim's irradiated cells. The reporter had gone to great lengths to put to rest any hope that something similar could be used on someone else.

"It's not an immortality drug," a Starfleet doctor said directly into the camera.

Another report detailed the toxic mix of chemicals found in the Augments' blood—propylene glycol, for one, to keep their blood from completely freezing, taking months after waking to finally dissipate from the bloodstream.

Khan had been awake for at least half a year working for Admiral Marcus. That's why only his blood could save the captain, why McCoy didn't simply crack open one of the other cryotubes and take what he needed from another Augment.

"I am less concerned with such obstacles," Spock said, "than I am with the probability that unethical people will find ways around them. Using the Augments' blood for personal gain is not only immoral, it is dangerous."

Even as she opened her mouth, she knew it was a mistake, but Nyota heard herself say, "Still, I'm glad we had it. The captain would be dead otherwise."

She felt a burr of unnamed emotions running between them and she hurried on.

"Yes, I realize I am being hypocritical here. That I don't think the blood should be used by anyone else for any other purpose. But I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't glad we were able to use it for Jim."

Spock said nothing else but the burr of emotions felt like a prickle under her skin all night as she tossed and turned and finally fell asleep.

In the morning when she woke he was already gone—not unusual in itself, but after their conversation the night before, it felt like an omen.

Looking up, she sees Sulu coming through the door. He's wearing his gold uniform shirt—making Nyota laugh.

"You aren't on duty yet," she says as he sits down beside her.

"But I'm ready," he says with a lopsided grin. Before she can think of a snappy response, Chekov joins them. In a few minutes, the table is full of returning crewmembers. Half an hour later, the bar is so noisy that Nyota can't hear herself speak.

She finishes her bourbon and is getting up to make her way to the bar to get another when she feels him—that peculiar aura that warms her skin when they stand close. Looking over her shoulder, she isn't surprised to see Spock standing there.

What does surprise her is that he is holding a glass of bourbon.

"For you," he says, his voice carrying over the roar of the crowd.

His fingers brush her own as he hands her the drink and suddenly she wants nothing more than to go home with him, to wrap her arms around his neck and nibble his ear until his eyes close of their own accord and his breath is uneven and ragged.

Wants to slide her hands under his shirt and up his chest, making him shiver with the sudden chill of exposed skin.

Wants to twine her fingers in his until their thoughts melt together, the sensations of her body drifting into the pleasure he feels, the electric charge of his _lok_ pressed against her thigh making her clothes feel unnecessary and silly.

Wants to lead him to the bed and press him down in willing surrender—

She takes a gulp of her bourbon and rolls it around her mouth, running her tongue over her teeth. Spock watches her closely.

"Let's go," she says, reaching behind her and pouring the remaining contents of her glass into McCoy's. Startled, he glances up.

"We're leaving," she shouts into his ear and he nods as she stands up. As she starts across the crowded room, Spock takes her hand, a rare public display of affection that makes her heart race.

They have just stepped outside the bar when the captain comes walking up, his jacket slung over one shoulder.

"Whoa!" he says. "You aren't leaving, are you?"

"We have an early day tomorrow," Nyota says coyly, but she has the unshakeable feeling that Kirk knows what's up. He grins like a schoolboy and reaches into his pocket.

"But I need my communications officer," he says slyly. She starts to protest and he raises one hand to silence her. "You can take it with you."

He hands her a pocket PADD.

"What is it?" she asks, and the captain says, "My speech. What I'm going to say tomorrow. I need you to read it and tell me if it's okay. Make any changes you think it needs, too."

He looks up at Spock and says, "It's not like you have anything planned for the rest of the evening."

She laughs then, and at her side Spock lifts one brow.

The bar isn't far from the faculty housing—a twenty-minute walk at most—but the evening is cool and wet and without discussing it, they cross the street and head to the shelter to wait for the next hoverbus. Nyota sits on the bench and Spock slides next to her, draping his arm around her shoulders to keep her warm. Pulling the PADD out, she angles it so they can both read it.

_There will always be those who mean us harm…_

An image of Khan advancing toward her on the garbage scow flashes through her mind and she shivers, not from the cold. She reads on until the captain mentions Admiral Pike, and she feels a catch in her throat. After all this time, and she still has trouble believing that he is gone.

_He had me recite the captain's pledge…Space, the final frontier…_

She can imagine how Jim Kirk will sound tomorrow saying these words before the assembled crowd of Starfleet personnel and civilian dignitaries. He will stand as a symbol of sacrifice and renewal as the missing man formation flies overhead, his voice echoing over the newly rebuilt assembly plaza.

He'll stand on the platform alone speaking words about the importance of exploration, of expanding their horizons.

But he won't be alone. Not really. Not as long as he is her captain. She'll be there, and so will Spock, and Sulu, and Chekov, and Dr. McCoy, and so many others that her heart wells up when she thinks of them gathered in the bar tonight, thinks of them sitting shoulder to shoulder tomorrow at the rechristening, thinks of the days and years to come when they will work and play together—and do all the things that families do.

Because that is what they are. What they always will be.

**A/N: The end! Sorry for such a long chapter, but it is the last one. Thanks for reading this story and for all the helpful reviews. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!**


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